Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
No. The headline is truthful. I subscribed to SA for 50+ years, saving old copies. About 15 years ago I got sick of the bias and threw out all the old issues. It ceased being science, instead it had become propaganda.
Comment · 10 years ago
Steve - did you read the FAQ? They really don't know what direction to go. At least Swift stuck with ARC, being a necessity as they were tasked with merging Swift with the Objective-C runtime for interoperability. Rust's multiple methods of memory management makes it strange, at best, for programmers to decide how to build a program or an API. Are the owners of Rust planning on adding a GC? Really?
Comment · 10 years ago
Go is unsuitable as a replacement for C because it is garbage collected. End of discussion.

Rust is unsuitable as a replacement for C because its memory management is poorly thought out (ie. its a joke). Here's the relevant paragraphs from the Rust FAQ. Really?

"Rust avoids the need for GC through its system of ownership and borrowing, but that same system helps with a host of other problems, including resource management in general and concurrency.

For when single ownership does not suffice, Rust programs rely on the standard reference-counting smart pointer type, Rc, and its thread-safe counterpart, Arc, instead of GC.

We are however investigating optional garbage collection as a future extension. The goal is to enable smooth integration with garbage-collected runtimes, such as those offered by the Spidermonkey and V8 JavaScript engines. Finally, some people have investigated implementing pure Rust garbage collectors without compiler support."

Comment · 10 years ago
For the simple case with a single iterator, yes the C-style for loop isn't as concise. However, there are lots of real-world situations where there is not a single iterator (e.g. looping through 2 arrays). Having to go back to 'while(boolean) { }' loops with initializers outside of the loop and incrementors at strange places inside the loop is much more confusing and error prone.
Comment · 10 years ago
The removal of prefix and postfix ++ and -- operators and the removal of C-style for loops are mistakes, IMO.
Comment · 10 years ago
It's called socialism folks. Government ownership of the means of production. Full stop.

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