TehPers

There’s a lot of bold claims being made. No segfaults, no memory leaks, etc. I’m curious to see how that’s implemented.

Also:

it’s safer than Rust because it lacks an “unsafe” keyword

lol

You can embed Lua pretty easily using a few different libraries. One I liked in particular was mlua. Lua is tiny, usually sufficiently fast, and easy to learn.

Otherwise, there are some others like Rhai, but there may be fewer resources available for users if you go with a less popular language.

Sometimes when I don’t leave comments like that, I get review comments asking what the line does. Code like ThisMethodInitsTheService() with comments like “what does this do?” in the review.

So now I comment a lot. Apparently reading code is hard for some people, even code that tells you exactly what it does in very simple terms.

newly manufactured vehicles should not already rust.

Seems to be a trend these days, unfortunately.

Rather than modifying your dependencies in the cache directory (which is really not a good idea), consider cloning the repo directly. You can use a patch entry in your Cargo.toml to have all references to iced_wgpu point to your local modified copy.

Honestly C is the future. I don’t know why people would move from C to any other language. It does the job well enough that there’s no reason not to use it.

Think about it. Every modern application depends on a piece of code written in C, not Rust or Zig or any other language (except assembly). It can be used to solve any problem, and works in more places than any other language.

These arguments about “security” and “memory safety” are all pointless anyway in the face of modern code scanning tools. Cross-platform dev can be done trivially with preprocessors. If that’s not enough, I don’t know what to say. Get better at writing C obviously.

Lifetimes and UB should all be kept in mind at all times. You can explicitly mark lifetimes in your C code if you want using comments. Any index-out-of-bounds bugs, use-after-free, etc are just signs that your team needs more training and better code scanning utils. Write more tests!

Anything more complex than a simple typedef is just a sign that you’re over-engineering your solution. #include is both simple, and does exactly what you’d expect any reasonable language to do - paste your referenced code inline. It’s genius, and doesn’t require any complicated explanations on namespaces and classes and subclasses and so on.

So which will be the future? C obviously.

/s

Correct - Rust’s attribute grammar allows any parseable sequence of tokens enclosed in #[attr ...] basically. Serde specifically requires things to be in strings, but this is not a requirement of modern Rust or modern versions of syn (if you’re comfortable writing your own parser for the meta).

The author is not a Rust expert though, so I’m not surprised to see this assumption. It doesn’t take away from the article though.

Edit: for fun, syn has an example parsing an attribute in an attribute

Reject assembly, return to machine code. Assembly is an inaccurate projection of what the machine truly does. Writing the binary by hand hardens us, and brings us closer to the computer. We better understand what our machine is doing when we calculate our jumps by hand.

The “‘modern’ development stack” we used at my school when I was in a CS program was C++98 or something, compiled using gcc directly. This was in the last decade. It technically wasn’t C!

But we did use C in my computer engineering classes so I guess they technically did teach it. I feel very fortunate that I haven’t needed to use it since then.

Adding a single unused function should no effect on runtime performance. The compiler removes dead code during compilation, and there’s no concept at runtime anyway of “creating a function” since it’s just a compile-time construct to group reusable code (generally speaking - yes the pedants will be right when they say functions appear in the compiled output, to some extent).

Anyway, this can all be tested on Godbolt anyway if you want to verify yourself. Make a function with and without a nested unused function and check the output.

Pushing HTML even further, one could say it’s a declarative programming language that programs a UI in a mostly-stateless manner (inputs aren’t really stateless but you can argue the state is provided by the UI rather than managed by HTML).

I’m not sure I’d make this leap myself though, I have a hard time classifying it (or any other markup language) as a PL. As far as I am aware, you can’t really program a state machine with pure HTML, though you can accept inputs and return outputs at least.

Two thoughts come to mind for me:

1. I think people should feel free to use any language however they want for their own needs and projects, but it’s also important to understand what exactly “unsound” and “undefined behavior” mean if you’re going to dabble with them. If it’s a risk you’re willing to take, go for it, but don’t be surprised if things break in ways that make no sense at all. Realistically a compiler won’t delete your root directory if you trigger UB or anything, but subtle bugs can creep in and change behaviors in ways that still run but which make unrelated code break in difficult to debug ways.
2. The borrow checker is one of Rust’s biggest features, so looking for ways around it feels a bit counterproductive. Feature-wise, Rust has a lot of cool constructs around traits and enums and such, but the language and its libraries are built around the assumption that the guarantees the compiler enforces in safe code will always be true. These guarantees extend beyond the borrow checker to things like string representation and thread safety as well. As an alternative, some other languages (like C++, which you mentioned, or maybe even Zig) might be better suited for this approach to “dirty-but-works” development, and especially with C++, there are some excellent tools and libraries available for game development.

Would it work to write the query as a common table expression, then select your columns from that table and join it with a count(*) aggregation of the table?

Or look at Python and their urllib, urllib2, new urllib, and the requests package on PyPi.

We already sort of saw this in Rust with crossbeam and standard channels, until of course they replaced the standard lib implementation with crossbeam’s implementation.

I think it’s good to document why things are done, but extracting things out into another function is just documenting what is being done with extra steps. This also comes with a number of problems:

1. Not all languages are readable. Documenting what is being done is important in some C, or when working with some libraries that have confusing usage syntax.
2. Not all people reading the code know the language or libraries well. Those people need guidance to understand what the code is trying to do. Function names can of course do this, but…
3. Not all types can be named in all languages. Some languages have a concept of “opaque types”, which explicitly have no name. If parameter and return types must be specified in that language, working around that restriction may result in unnecessarily complicated code.
4. Longer files (the result of having dozens of single-use functions) are less readable. Related logic is now detached into pointers that go all over the file all because of an allergic reaction to code comments, where a simple // or # would have made the code just as readable.
5. Function names can be just as outdated as code comments. Both require upkeep. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve seen some truly misleading/incorrect function names.

If those functions are huge units of work or pretty complex, I can agree. For most cases though, a simple code comment should do to explain what’s going on?

While impressive, a minifier can bring it down to 1 line of JS! I do like that this can function as a reference for making simple canvas-based games though.

Still working on an assertions library that I started a few weeks ago. I finally managed to get async assertions working:

expect!(foo(), when_ready, all, not, to_equal(0)).await;

It also captures values passed down the assertion chain and reports them on failure (without requiring all types to implement Debug since it uses autoref specialization).

Hopefully it’ll be ready for a release soon.

I also avoid query syntax generally because I find it hard to map to method syntax with more complex queries. It’s a cool concept though, despite it being painful to use.

For library code - yes, you’d usually want to direct users to the correct way of using the library, so you’d be more likely to come across fallible build functions or a bunch of type parameters to constrain when it can be called.

For applications - honestly, it’s your code, so do what makes sense to you. Using a build function can help you ensure your settings were fully configured before using them, but it’s up to you if that’s the direction that makes the most sense to you. One benefit is you only need to perform the check once, but the downside is having another “built” type that you need to keep in sync with the original type. You can also look at libraries like derive_builder if you want to have your builder generated for you to avoid needing to manually update two separate types.