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Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

That's the 30% vibe code they promised us.

Cynicism aside, something seems to be going wrong in our industry.

Going? I think we got there a long time ago. I'm sure we all try our best but our industry doesn't take quality seriously enough. Not compared to every other kind of engineering discipline.

Always been there. But it seems to be creeping into institutions that previously cared over the past few years, accelerating in the last.

Salaries are flat relative to inflation and profits. I've long felt that some of the hype around "AI" is part of a wage suppression tactic.

Also “Rewrite it in Rust”.

P.S. it’s a joke, guys, but you have to admit it’s at least partially what’s happening

No, it has nothing to do with Rust.

The first one had something to do with Rust :-)

Not really. In C or C++ that could have just been a segfault.

.unwrap() literally means “I’m not going to handle the error branch of this result, please crash”.

Indeed, but fortunately there are more languages in the world than Rust and C++. A language that performed decently well and used exceptions systematically (Java, Kotlin, C#) would probably have recovered from a bad data file load.

There is nothing that prevents you from recovering from a bad data file load in Rust. The programmer who wrote that code chose to crash.

That's exactly my point. There should be no such thing as choosing to crash if you want reliable software. Choosing to crash is idiomatic in Rust but not in managed languages in which exceptions are the standard way to handle errors.

I am not a C# guy, but I wrote a lot of Java back in the day, and I can authoritatively tell you that it has so-called "checked exceptions" that the compiler forces you to handle. However, it also has "runtime exceptions" that you are not forced to handle, and they can happen any where and any time. Conceptually, it is the same as error versus panic in Rust. One such runtime exception is the notorious `java.lang.NullPointerException` a/k/a the billion-dollar mistake. So even software in "managed" languages can and does crash, and it is way more likely to do so than software written in Rust, because "managed" languages do not have all the safety features Rust has.

When dotnet has an unhandled exception, it terminates with abort.

In practice, programs written in managed languages don't crash in the sense of aborting the entire process. Exceptions are usually caught at the top level (both checked and unchecked) and then logged, usually aborting the whole unit of work.

For trapping a bad data load it's as simple as:

    try {
        data = loadDataFile();
    } catch (Exception e) {
        LOG.error("Failed to load new data file; continuing with old data", e);        
    }

This kind of code is common in such codebases and it will catch almost any kind of error (except out of memory errors).

Here is the Java equivalent of what happened in that Cloudflare Rust code:

  try {
    data = loadDataFile();
  } catch (Exception e) {
    LOG.error("Failed to load new data file", e);
    System.exit(1);
  }

So the "bad data load" was trapped, but the programmer decided that either it would never actually occur, or that it is unrecoverable, so it is fine to .unwrap(). It would not be any less idiomatic if, instead of crashing, the programmer decided to implement some kind of recovery mechanism. It is that programmer's fault, and has nothing to do with Rust.

Also, if you use general try-catch blocks like that, you don't know if that try-catch block actually needs to be there. Maybe it was needed in the past, but something changed, and it is no longer needed, but it will stay there, because there is no way to know unless you specifically look. Also, you don't even know the exact error types. In Rust, the error type is known in advance.

Yes, I know. But nobody writes code like that in Java. I don't think I've ever seen it outside of top level code in CLI tools. Never in servers.

> It is that programmer's fault, and has nothing to do with Rust.

It's Rust's fault. It provides a function in its standard library that's widely used and which aborts the process. There's nothing like that in the stdlibs of Java or .NET

> Also, if you use general try-catch blocks like that, you don't know if that try-catch block actually needs to be there.

I'm not getting the feeling you've worked on many large codebases in managed languages to be honest? I know you said you did but these patterns and problems you're raising just aren't problems such codebases have. Top level exception handlers are meant to be general, they aren't supposed to be specific to certain kinds of error, they're meant to recover from unpredictable or unknown errors in a general way (e.g. return a 500).

> It's Rust's fault. It provides a function in its standard library that's widely used and which aborts the process. There's nothing like that in the stdlibs of Java or .NET

It is the same as runtime exceptions in Java. In Rust, if you want to have a top-level "exception handler" that catches everything, you can do

  ::std::panic::catch_unwind(|| {
    // ...
  })

In case of Cloudflare, the programmer simply chose to not handle the error. It would have been the same if the code was written in Java. There simply would be no top-level try-catch block.

Look at how much additional boilerplate it took in your example to ignore the error.

In the Rust case you just don’t call unwrap() if you want to swallow errors like that.

It’s also false that catching all exceptions is how you end up with reliable software. In highly available architectures (e.g. many containers managed by kubernetes), if you end up in a state where you can’t complete work at all, it’s better to exit the process immediately to quickly get removed from load balancing groups, etc.

General top level exceptions handlers are a huge code smell because catching exceptions you (by definition) didn’t expect is a great way to have corrupted data.

The error wasn't ignored, it was logged (and it's an example on a web forum, in reality you'd at least increment a metric too and do other things).

> General top level exceptions handlers are a huge code smell

And yet millions of programs have such things and they work fine. My experience has been that they tend to be more reliable than other programs. E.g. IntelliJ hardly ever tears down the entire process when something goes wrong, it fails gracefully and reports back to HQ whereas other IDEs I've used hard crash quite regularly. Much more disruptive.

unwrap is NOT idiomatic in Rust

But it might have something to do with the "rewrite" part:

> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive.

> Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it’s just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I’ll tell you why: those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes that bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes that bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the disk in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95.

> Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.

> When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

From https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

A lot of words for a 'might'. We don't know what caused the downtime.

Not this time; but the rewrite was certainly implicated in the previous one. They actually had two versions deployed; in response to unexpected configuration file size, the old version degraded gracefully, while the new version failed catastrophically.

Both versions were taken off-guard by the defective configuration they fetched, it was not a case of a fought and eliminated bug reappearing like in the blogpost you quoted.

it's never the technology, it's the implementation

Did you consider to rewrite your joke in rust?

cc: @oncall then trigger pagerduty :)

> Cynicism aside, something seems to be going wrong in our industry.

Started after the GFC and the mass centralisation of infrastructure

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