| ▲ | naikrovek 3 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
are you saying that such understanding isn't enough or that every C programmer who said that didn't understand those things? C and Zig aren't the same. I would wager that syntax differences between languages can help you see things in one language that are much harder to see in another. I'm not saying that Zig or C are good or bad for this, or that one is better than the other in terms of the ease of seeing memory problems with your eyes, I'm just saying that I would bet that there's some syntax that could be employed which make memory usage much more clear to the developer, instead of requiring that the developer keep track of these things in their mind. Even if you must manually annotate each function so that some metaprogram that runs at compile time can check that nothing is out of place could help detect memory leaks, I would think. or something; that's just an idea. There's a whole metaprogramming world of possibilities here that Zig allows that C simply doesn't. I think there's a lot of room for tooling like this to detect problems without forcing you to contort yourself into strange shapes simply to make the compiler happy. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | kstenerud 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
> are you saying that such understanding isn't enough or that every C programmer who said that didn't understand those things? Probably both. They're words of hubris. C and Zig give the appearance of practicality because they allow you to take shortcuts under the assumption that you know what you're doing, whereas Rust does not; it forces you to confront the edge cases in terms of ownership and provenance and lifetime and even some aspects of concurrency right away, and won't compile until you've handled them all. And it's VERY frustrating when you're first starting because it can feel so needlessly bureaucratic. But then after awhile it clicks: Ownership is HARD. Lifetimes are HARD. And suddenly when going back to C and friends, you find yourself thinking about these things at the design phase rather than at the debugging phase - and write better, safer code because of it. And then when you go back to Rust again, you breathe a sigh of relief because you know that these insidious things are impossible to screw up. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | capitol_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Just understanding the rules are not enough, you also need to be consistently good so that you never make a mistake that gets into production. On both your average days and your bad days. Over the 40 to 50 years that your carer lasts. I guess those kind of developers exist, but I know that I'm not one of them. | |||||||||||||||||
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