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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

> vs. the obvious legacy/unchecked idioms

You can go crazy with legazy/unchecked/unsafe stuff if you want to in Rust. It's less convenient and more difficult than C in some ways, but 1) it's also safer and more convenient in other ways, and 2) "this will be safe and convenient" isn't exactly the reason we dive into legacy/unchecked/unsafe stuff.

And of course the greatest strength of the whole Rust language is that folks who want to do crazy unsafe stuff can package it up in a safe interface for the rest of us to use.

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> crazy unsafe stuff

The first example in the linked article is checking if a value is stored in a container and doing something different if it's not than if it is. Hardly "crazy unsafe stuff".

I think there's an important distinction here. A systems programming language needs to have all the max speed / minimum overhead / UB-prone stuff available, but that stuff doesn't need to be the default / most convenient way of doing things. Rust heavily (both syntactically and culturally) encourages safe patterns that sometimes involve runtime overhead, like checked indexing, but this isn't the same as "forcing" you into these patterns.

And I can only repeat verbatim: The first example in the linked article is checking if a value is stored in a container and doing something different if it's not than if it is.

Hardly "max speed / minimum overhead / UB-prone stuff"

It is also behavior that we want to change, it's just non-trivial to do so.

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2024/06/02/the...

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/10/06/polonius-u...

It’s sad to see your comment this far in the thread after having had go be coxed to make it and after all the usual defensive arguments from the Rust crowd. It’s a real issue that it’s so hard to make the Rust community admits that obvious flaws actually exist.

As someone who spent a significant time working on static analysers and provers, it annoys me to no end how most of the Rust community will happily take what the borrow checker imposes on them as some form of gospel and never questions the tool. It’s bordering on Stockholm syndrome sometimes.

I think a lot of pushback is because people are talking past each other.

The reality:

- the borrow checker has limitations that doesn't accept some constructs that could be be proved safe, given Rust's own rules

- the borrow checker is a net positive as it does push you towards better constructs, and the (rare) times it forbids you from doing something that could be safe, you have safe (sometimes not zero-cost) and unsafe escape hatches

But these are then understood by the intransigent as:

- the borrow checker is always detrimental

- the borrow checker can do nothing wrong

At that point, no one can understand why the other person is being obtuse, and you end up with... well, the comment section under every Rust article.

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