the_arcadian

"What I am proposing is simple - the End key should do what it says on the label, which is take you to the end of the web page. So for infinitely scrolling web pages, which have no end, they should just continue to load data until there is nothing left to load, or until you’ve exhausted every scrap of RAM and hard drive space your system can find." (excerpt)

"But after it was assembled, I found a defect - a faint, flickering green band across my monitor. It sounds like a problem with the monitor or the cable, but it wasn’t - it disappeared when I installed an inexpensive video card, bypassing the motherboard’s HDMI port. For a server, the defect made absolutely no difference whatsoever, since the system wasn’t even going to be plugged into a monitor. But it could be a sign of a failing motherboard." (excerpt)

They say it is always easier to con intelligent people, because they don't think they are capable of being fooled.

> Ideally, you don’t want to make a self-referential struct in Rust. Instead you should leverage other types to accomplish the same thing; for example Rc<T> can be used for things like linked-lists or trees. Also, have a look for libraries that might do this work for you, as these are very easy to do wrong.

LOL, sure borrow-checked reference counted pointers that can't equal null to mark the beginning or end of a chain are exactly what I am looking for when I want to build a linked list or tree. Why are you like this, Rust?

The reason people use systems programming languages is because they need to efficiently and effectively manage and manipulate memory. That's why C was created in the first place - to write the 100,000+ lines of code that would become Unix Version 4 in 1973. (Not bad for a two year old language.)

Which means that when you present me with a systems programming language that enforces an ownership concept that makes it much more difficult to write allocators or even doubly linked data structures, and then use that language's existence to justify adding the same restrictions into a version of C, "who asked for this?" might well be the least offensive response I can muster.

Right, I understand that big corporations are pushing a new systems programming language that they say saves programmers from their own mistakes. My question was whether any programmers actually asked for it, and if so, which ones?

> We use languages that impose other “arbitrary” constraints on us

> The ownership model is a similar concept [to type checking]

Except we didn't. K&R rejected Pascal for their work on Unix precisely because it was too strongly typed and didn't provide sufficient escape hatches. Arrays were typed by length, there was no pointer arithmetic, there was little or no typecasting or coercion, no generic pointer types, no null pointers, etc.

All these restrictions that were in place to create a safer language made Pascal completely unsuited to writing allocators, buffered IO, and other OS internals. So instead, they ditched Pascal and created C and had Unix up in running in just a couple of years. Maybe there's a lesson there.

> So, what does the current ferment about Rust tell us? That the industry is ready to accept that programmers take a more disciplined approach by embracing strong data typing enhanced with program annotations.

I have a question. Who asked for this? Like who exactly raised their hand and said yes, I want a systems programming language that won't let me compile syntactically and semantically correct programs because they don't follow an arbitrary ownership model?

I heard that systems programming used to be dangerous and scary but then Rust was invented so now its okay.

Confusion? No it's just flat out obfuscation.

This sounds like a /r/politics headline.

While I generally agree that when someone does something violent, you blame them rather than the words on the page or the screen that they read, Reddit is an awful example here since its TOS is so perverse that it protects the most extreme and dishonest views on one side and then stifles any discussion and debate on the other.

So for example, if I posted "100 black Americans are killed every day by white Americans", which is obviously both misleading and inaccurate, you would be risking your account by engaging in any kind of discussion or debate, or even arguing that you should be allowed to discuss and debate that. That's because you would be violating multiple rules - first, a rule that protects specific races from criticism, second, a rule that disallows even accurate breakdowns of crime by race, and third, a rule that prevents you from discussing and debating aspects of the TOS itself.

Thus, by the rules of Reddit, my statement would stand completely unchallenged. Now realistically I don't think my statement alone would result in a rash of payback crimes, but over time you are giving people a skewed version of the world in which violence can be justified. And sure, one could argue that they're not legally responsible for what people do and that any attempt to hold them responsible is guilt by association, but OTOH I don't think any social media company wants that kind of reputation and press.

Found this comment when I did a ctrl-F to see who was breaking the first rule of Usenet LOL

Read up on creatine - it may help you.