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mkipper 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you remove "develop" from the OP and stick to "prototype", it's a totally valid criticism, and you come across as a condescending jerk if you suggest that software can't be "working" unless it's bug-free.

I can't count the number of times I've wanted to try out some library and whipped up a quick prototype app in an hour or two to play around with it. I don't give a damn if that app is memory safe, handles signals safely, satisfies arcane aliasing rules or deals with any of the other million footguns in C/C++. I'm happy if it compiles and does what I want it to. I deal with that stuff when I inevitably rewrite it from scratch the next day and have an actual design in mind.

FWIW, I'm comfortable enough with Rust that I would personally choose it over C or C++ for most stuff like this these days since the standard library makes a lot of boilerplate prototyping stuff (e.g. setting up a project, pulling in dependencies, handling files and I/O) much more pleasant. But suggesting that anyone who writes unsafe C/C++ in any context doesn't know what they're doing is ridiculous.

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truculent 18 hours ago | parent [-]

What trade-offs are you typically evaluating with the prototype?

Have you ever found that decision harder to make because of shortcuts etc taken during prototype?

	▲	mkipper 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Like everything, “it depends”. I used to work on a product that handled video, and I would regularly spin up prototypes where I’d stitch together gstreamer pipelines with different plugins to try things out. For reasons that aren’t important, it was easier to use an app linked against the gstreamer libraries than to use its CLI. There were all sorts of ways I’d evaluate some plugin I was trying out. Maybe I’d look at some test pattern for artifacts. Maybe I’d measure latency. Maybe I’d profile its resource usage. But I can confidently say that in all of those cases, the memory safety of the 100 lines of C++ code that told gstreamer how to plug things together had absolutely no impact on what I was evaluating. Sometimes the code you’re writing is basically unrelated to what you’re interested in from a prototype.

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catlifeonmars 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Working software doesn’t always have to be correct or safe. This is highly use case dependent. Rust’s guarantees aren’t free, it comes with a handful of tradeoffs, such as learning curve, implementation speed, (this one is personally annoying) compilation speed, and portability. I’m a huge proponent of using the right language for the job. Sometimes rust is the obvious choice, sometimes it’s Python, Go, Lua, Java, Prolog, C, brainfuck etc.

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pdimitar 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Working software doesn’t always have to be correct or safe.

I feel like I am missing some very obvious point of yours because that statement in isolation I cannot agree with (I've read the rest of your comment and still can't find the extra context). Can you clarify?

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tylersmith 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	suby 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are really being a jerk in this entire thread. Here is an 18,000+ word article on one domain where Rust is not a great fit. https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/
	▲	placebo 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Working software and correct software are two different things and understanding that like in most things there is a tradeoff might be beneficial.