“An abrupt exit”, more commonly known as a “crash”.
If you’re going to argue that an exit through panic!() is not a crash, I will argue that your definition of a crash is just an abrupt exit initiated by the OS. In other words, there’s no meaningful distinction as the result is the same.
I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. While I don’t share your conviction, I do admit it’s certainly a possibility.
The advantage of doing things that way is that code becomes much more portable. We may finally reach the goal of “write once, run anywhere”, because the AI may write all the platform specific code.
It does make a big assumption that the AI output is reliable enough though. At times people will want to tweak the output, so how are they gonna go about that? Maybe if the language is based on Markdown, you can inject snippets of code where necessary. But if you have to do that too often, such a language will lose its appeal.
There’s a lot of unknowns, but I see why it’s a tempting idea.
You know, as a full-time Linux user, I think I rather have game developers continue to create Windows executables.
Unlike most software, games have a tendency to be released, then supported for one or two years, and then abandoned. But meanwhile, operating systems and libraries move on.
If you have a native Linux build of a game from 10 years ago, good luck trying to run it on your modern system. With Windows builds, using Wine or Proton, you actually have better chances running games from 10 or even 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, thanks to Valve’s efforts, Windows builds have incentive to target Vulkan, they’re getting tested on Linux. That’s what we should focus on IMO, because those things make games better supported on Linux. Which platform the binary is compiled for is an implementation detail… and Win32 is actually the more stable target.
tsc is (very) slow and there are also no convenient ways to interact with it from Rust.
So it saves a lot development and CI time to roll our own. The downside is that our inference still isn’t as good as tsc of course, but we’re hopeful the community can help us get very close at least.
I see this argument repeated here every now and then, but it’s not true: https://aoav.org.uk/2020/the-effects-of-strategic-bombing-in-wwii-on-german-morale/
To summarise: Bombing had a profound effect on depressing morale through inducing defeatism, fear and apathy. Bombing did not harden popular resolve against the US. The hate and anger it aroused was directed against the Nazi regime, not the Allies.
That’s still a very major achievement! Do I understand correctly this means all target architectures supported by GCC are now unlocked for Rust too?
It’s that the compiler doesn’t help you with preventing race conditions. This makes some problems so hard to solve in C that C programmers simply stay away from attempting it, because they fear the complexity involved.
It’s a variation of the same theme: Maybe a C programmer could do it too, given infinite time and skill. But in practice it’s often not feasible.
I’m not saying you can’t, but it’s a lot more work to use such solutions, to say nothing about their quality compared to std solutions in other languages.
And it’s also just one example. If we bring multi-threading into it, we’re opening another can of worms where C doesn’t particularly shine.
I would argue that because C is so hard to program in, even the claim to machine efficiency is arguable. Yes, if you have infinite time for implementation, then C is among the most efficient, but then the same applies to C++, Rust and Zig too, because with infinite time any artificial hurdle can be cleared by the programmer.
In practice however, programmers have limited time. That means they need to use the tools of the language to save themselves time. Languages with higher levels of abstraction make it easier, not harder, to reach high performance, assuming the abstractions don’t provide too much overhead. C++, Rust and Zig all apply in this domain.
An example is the situation where you need a hash map or B-Tree map to implement efficient lookups. The languages with higher abstraction give you reusable, high performance options. The C programmer will need to either roll his own, which may not be an option if time Is limited, or choose a lower-performance alternative.
Of course, but it needn’t be black and white. You can also diversify, make yourself less reliant on a single platform. And by doing so, enable your audience to follow you elsewhere. Or diversify into different activities altogether. And when it’s no longer half your income on the line, then switch.
But doing nothing and saying, “but half my income!”? That’s not only a choice, but also complacency.
Great points, except:
People can’t leave for anything smaller.
They can and some do. It’s still a choice.
That’s fair, although technically you could catch SIGSEGV and release resources that way too.
Also, given that resources will be reclaimed by the OS regardless of which kind of crash we’re talking about, the effective difference is usually (but not always) negligible.
Either way, no user would consider a
panic!()to be not a crash because destructors ran. And most developers don’t either.