Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that’s not really an answer.
What exactly are the hazards of shared memory and locks? The ownership system and the borrow checker do a pretty good job at enforcing correct usage, and if you are clever you can even guarantee no deadlocks (talk at rustconf 2024 about the fuchsia network stack).
But I think if you manage to use-after-free or other memory error in safe Rust it’s a compiler bug. Or you used unsafe and have a soundness issue in the code you did.
Note : as I understand it, unsafe is a way to tell the compiler you can check its safety guarantees yourself. But you may fail and get back other languages inexistent guarantees.
Go routines are certainly special and hard to match, but rust has all the normal abstractions of a language like C, just with a borrow checker so you can avoid memory leaks, write after read, etc.
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that’s not really an answer.
What exactly are the hazards of shared memory and locks? The ownership system and the borrow checker do a pretty good job at enforcing correct usage, and if you are clever you can even guarantee no deadlocks (talk at rustconf 2024 about the fuchsia network stack).
They are OS threads (so yes heavy).
But I think if you manage to use-after-free or other memory error in safe Rust it’s a compiler bug. Or you used
unsafeand have a soundness issue in the code you did.Note : as I understand it, unsafe is a way to tell the compiler you can check its safety guarantees yourself. But you may fail and get back other languages inexistent guarantees.
Go routines are certainly special and hard to match, but rust has all the normal abstractions of a language like C, just with a borrow checker so you can avoid memory leaks, write after read, etc.