Do you have a different recommendation for how to display unnameable types in error messages? I’m sure the compiler team would consider any suggestions.

Well, that’s fair; first-class support for running an actual Linux kernel, with the containerization support that implies, is one of the reasons I prefer Windows with WSL as a dev environment when using Docker (at least, in companies where the IT team won’t just let you run native Linux).

MacOS and docker is asking for trouble.

That’s a real problem! MacOS and Docker are extremely common for development, and a scripting language like Python should just work with them, not just at the language level (which is good enough) but in the ecosystem and tooling. The latter is what Astral is trying to improve.

There is only one mention of Python being slow, and that’s in the form of a joke where Python is crossed out and replaced with “the wrong tool for the job.” Elsewhere in the post, Python is mentioned more positively; it just isn’t what’s needed for the kind of gamedev the author wants to do.

Every single time I’ve tried to work on a file using tabs, I’ve had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I’ve yet to see it work well.

(For what it’s worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)

I feel like we’re talking past each other. My impression was that 30% towards your living situation is a pretty decent target; what would you expect the percentage to be?

Okay, what I meant was, is rent taking 30% really indicative of a low standard of living?

Rent eating 30-40% of your income is extremely normal, isn’t it? Or is that only true in the US (where it has recently become much more than that for many people)?

Lots of acronyms no longer stand for anything due to losing their original associations. LLVM, AT&T, SAT (the test, not the programming problem), etc.

They did consider making environment-manipulation functions atomic; the problem is that there’s simply no way to guarantee that everything that can manipulate your process’s environment is actually beholden to whatever atomic interface Rust provides. I could be misremembering, but I think there was even some discussion with glibc maintainers about whether this could be made safe, and the answer was basically “haha no.”

I don’t think it’s fair to consider unsafe Rust such a small subset of the language that it requires calling it out as a separate thing from “Rust” in the title of an article. Unsafe constructs are necessary in the standard library and many crates, whether or not you use it in the code you actually write.

This article somehow links to both the Reference and the Ferrocene spec, but still concludes that an official non-Ferrocene spec is necessary.

Why doesn’t the Ferrocene spec accomplish what the author wants? He states:

In other words, without a clear and authoritative specification, Rust cannot be used to achieve EAL5.

What? Why can’t the Ferrocene spec (and compiler) be used? Do Ferrocene and TÜV SÜD not count as “some group of experts”?

(Regarding the author’s opening paragraphs, the Reference does make the same distinction about drop scopes for variables versus temporaries, though I can see why he finds the Ferrocene spec clearer. But that doesn’t demonstrate that the Reference is useless as a stand-in for a specification.)

That’s actually not how any language has ever been written, though it’s easy to get that impression from how much the C and C++ communities emphasize their formal specifications.

But in fact, both languages were in production use for over a decade before they had a formal spec. And languages with formal specifications are actually a tiny minority of programming languages.

There is indeed a caveat in the introduction to the Reference that there may be statements in it that are specific to rustc. However, the authors strive to keep statements about the implementation separate from statements about the language.

The main reason there’s not yet an “official” spec is that creating one takes enormous time and money, which are always limited resources. (Note that both C and C++ had no formal standard for over a decade after their initial release.) The Reference is “good enough” to make a formal spec not strictly necessary, and the existence of Ferrocene makes it even less necessary, since anyone who absolutely needs a spec can use Ferrocene.

You can say the Rust implementation is wrong if it doesn’t conform to the Reference. That is not the same as “you personally disagree with the behavior.”

Rust’s guarantees about the behavior of safe code are far stronger than anything C or C++ provides, with or without a formal spec.

In case you’re still interested in this type of resource, here’s another one I just learned about: https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/

It’s by the Android team at Google, and while it doesn’t require knowledge of C++, it seems to be intended to bring devs up to speed on the concepts required for using Rust in Android and Chromium.

Wow, I definitely should have google that myself before asking, but thank you for explaining and calling out that data point.

I honestly think that shows that it was in fact a bad idea to assign TLDs to countries. Having a country code acronym with a popular tech meaning is essentially just luck of the draw, so they’ve basically just arbitrarily given a few small countries a valuable resource to sell. I guess that benefits those countries, but I doubt “quasi-random fundraising for small countries” was ever the intent.

But do they actually have autonomy, give that random companies can use .io and .ai? Or did the British Indian Ocean Territory and Anguilla approve all such uses of those domains?

Why top-level, though? Why not amazon.in.com?

Obviously this isn’t specific to Rust, but frankly it’s bizarre to me that ICANN chose to tie top-level domains to country codes in the first place. Languages might have made sense, but a major feature of the internet is that it’s less beholden to political boundaries than most of the physical world is.