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points by lakeviewterrace 1 day ago | 0 comments

All the time wasted on navel-gazing could have been spent auditing and fixing the original projects' code.

Starting anew WILL introduce new bugs. This is a statistical certainty.

Most Rust rewrites are justified upon imaginary boogeymen. The complex security nightmares of 'cp' 'ls' and 'rm' were begging for a new design.

[–] danielheath 1 day ago

One would never return “*” to signal an error in rust code (or any language with an option type).

[–] Scoring6931 1 day ago

Nothing precludes error handling in C. It's on the programmers to actually do it.

[–] danielheath 7 hours ago

If you forget to do it in C, everything still looks superficially right.

If you forget to do it in rust (or zig, or typescript, or any of the hundreds of languages with option types), your code doesn't compile.

Nothing precludes "simply do not fall off" when working off heights, either, but there's a reason safety harnesses are mandatory when working at heights in most of the developed world.

[–] Ygg2 1 day ago

Nothing precludes having legible programs in Brainfuck[1]. It's on programmers to actually do it.

[1] Other than the language itself.

Same goes for C, it's reliance on weakish type system is what causes its numerous fuckups.

[–] mxey 17 hours ago

Imagine every Rust program just calling unwrap on this result, and therefore the Rust library deciding to just never return an error. That’s analogous to what happened here.

[–] saghm 1 day ago

If your goal is to convince people that you're right, describing things as "time wasted on navel-gazing" is not the type of thing that will win people over. It comes across as arrogant and entitled, as if the world would be better if everyone would just recognize you're smarter and therefore should do whatever you want.

If you're just pissed and trying to blow off steam, maybe this choice of words will help a bit, but because of the issues described above, it also might just cause a bunch of people to react negatively towards you and therefore make your mood worse.

If you're just commenting here as something to reference in the future for when you expect to say "I told you so!" to everyone, I guess this is a reasonable way of doing it. It still doesn't really seem like there's much need for phrasing it like that though; people still might look back and think that you're right but still sound arrogant and entitled.

[–] UqWBcuFx6NV4r 1 day ago

I can’t stress this enough: there are—rightfully—a whole bunch of people that simply do not want to work on C codebases, because in the typical case, working wIth C sucks. Your outbursts are never going to change this, no matter how petulant or vitriolic. Amazing how a group of people has made “[aversion to{ languages with far fewer footguns” into some sort of culture war issue. Sorry that the industry is forcing you to read a book or whatever.