This is an especially hard ask, given how useful the FP-like features of Rust are, and I find it almost impossible to live without them. Basically, I am looking for a middle ground between C/Zig and Rust.
One such language I have found is Austral[0]. What other such languages are there?
[0] https://austral-lang.org/
That's quite the oversimplification...
C# is not a systems-programming language: it's an application-programming language that is heavily dependent on the CLR runtime environment. While those research-kernels certainly do bring a-kind-of-CLR into the kernel it's far from being like the CLR in .NET; but they don't use C# - at least, not the same C# you use in Visual Studio: those research kernels: Singularity, Midori and Verve - used not only the Sing# and Spec# extensions to C#, they had their own compiler (Bartok) which itself enabled other language-extensions.
That said, those extensions are fascinating reads:
Sing# concerns message-passing ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... )
Spec# added Ada-style (i.e. compiler-enforced) invariants and pre/post-conditions (this was the basis for the Code Contracts feature which was annoyingly/tragically killed-off during the .NET Core reboot in 2016); see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/spec/
Bartok: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Incorrect, the main restriction are the targets supported by CoreCLR/NativeAOT/Mono(to an extent).
Or, at least, if you pick all memory-safe languages with GC, C# offers the most when it comes to low-level access.
I absolutely adore Ada [1], but the Pascal-syntax isn't for everyone.
I haven't used it yet, but have been hearing rumblings about Odin [2] a fair bit in these kinds of discussions. I tend to avoid too many symbol-heavy langs, but it's probably still less than Rust (I use a screenreader half the time).
As for concerns... The main developer is a concern. Hard to trust them to support the language well, with some of the... Well, tantrums. This isn't aimed at a personal attack. But it is very hard to describe their responses in another manner.
This [0] thread on HN covers some of all of the above.
But, probably also important to point out that V and its drama have had dang threaten to ban the topic altogether [1]. There's a lot of drama.
If, of course, by "demons" you mean people who write nicely formatted, polite, well-written responses attempting to answer your question fully, including links to further reading.
The comment wasn't about anyone in particular.
(I have no idea what the current state is)
I think that's a fair thing to say. But in all honesty, the people pointing that out were not exactly polite about it, to put it mildly.
I never really looked at V myself and have no opinion, but I do know unpleasant behaviour when I see it and quite a few of the people "pointing out" some of the shortcomings of V were engaging in it.
See this article and the discussions, and if you’re so inclined follow along links in that thread from last time that show folks from the vlang team flaming all over HN.
> But I've had a few issues with the safety aspects of the language. Breaking through the checker isn't that difficult.
What do you mean? Can you "break through the checker" outside of unsafe blocks?
But there was a time where autofree was just a compiler flag and wasn't actually implemented, even though the author claimed that it was.
> Austral is a new systems programming language. It uses linear types to provide memory safety and capability-secure code, and is designed to be simple enough to be understood by a single person, with a focus on readability, maintainbility, and modularity.
Just remember that even if writing memory-safe programs is your goal, using a memory-safe language is just a means to that goal, and even Rust isn't really memory-safe. Many Rust programs try to achieve memory safety while using a non-memory-safe language (be it C or unsafe Rust), and there's an entire spectrum of combining language features that offer sound guarantees with careful analysis and testing of unsafe code to achieve a safe program. On that spectrum, Zig is much closer to Rust than to C, even though it offers fewer guarantees than Rust (but more than C).
This is primarily an educational exercise to see how people find compromises that work for them, and languages in the same space as Rust using alternative strategies.
One thing that's important to notice, I think, is that low-level languages' combined market share has fallen sharply since the 1970s, and it doesn't seem that the trend is about to sharply reverse direction. To me that suggests that if a low-level language wants to be more popular than C++, it should focus on low-level programming and shouldn't try to also be a good applications programming language (as C++ has tried to do that, but the overall market share of C and C++ is lower now than it was in, say, 1990), but I could be wrong about that.
Is this something you experience when writing your code, or is this something you experience when reading other people's code?
If it's the former, I'd really love to hear more about those experiences.
If it's the latter, are there particular features that crop up that make code feel like too much?
(To be clear, Rust isn't perfect for everyone, despite our best efforts. And if you want to work with another language, you should! I'm not looking to defend it; your experiences are valid. We'd love to make Rust better, so I didn't want to miss the opportunity to ask, because we so rarely hear from people in the intersection of "I love Rust" and "Rust is too much".)
I feel like my biggest struggle is simply how hard (tedious?) it is to properly work with generics and some more complex applications of traits. Any time I am working with (especially writing, somehow reading is easier) these, I always take an ungodly amount of time to do anything productive.
I am almost certainly sure this is a skill issue -- I am simply not "Rusting" like I am supposed to. Maybe I overuse generics, maybe I rely on traits too much, maybe I am trying to abstract stuff away too much. But this is one of the reasons I want to also explore other languages in the space, especially ones which make it impossible for me to make this so complex.
Don't get me wrong -- all of this complexity is a joy to work with when I can use my brain. But sometimes, it's just too much effort to do stuff, and it feels like I could be getting away with less. Curiously, I never had a problem with the borrow checker, even though people often complaining about how much it forces them to "stop and think".
Another thing is that C, for some weird reason, always feels "lower level" than Rust, and seeing it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction that Rust does not. Maybe it's just a greener grass syndrome, but wanted to mention it nonetheless.
All this said, I want to just emphasise, that despite this shortcoming (if it even is one), if I were forced to choose a language to spend the rest of my life with, I would not be the least bit sad to only ever use Rust again. I absolutely love it.
> Maybe I overuse generics, maybe I rely on traits too much, maybe I am trying to abstract stuff away too much.
Is this related to the problem where, if you want to put a generic in a data structure (e.g. an implementation of `Write`), you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures?
Asking because one thing that's common amongst Rust developers is a bit of an aversion to using `dyn Trait` types, and using a `Box<dyn Write>` (for instance) in the right place can wildly simplify your program.
> But sometimes, it's just too much effort to do stuff, and it feels like I could be getting away with less.
The next times you find this feeling arising, please feel free to reach out, if you'd like; I would genuinely love to hear about it. You can reach me by DM on the Rust Zulip, or by the email in my profile.
> Another thing is that C, for some weird reason, always feels "lower level" than Rust, and seeing it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction that Rust does not. Maybe it's just a greener grass syndrome, but wanted to mention it nonetheless.
I was originally a C developer, and I can sympathize. I don't tend to crave that "lower level" feeling often, but for me, there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it.
> you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures
And I did exactly that. I did eventually get around to using dyn Write, but that still gave me headaches because of how I cannot use impl Write as a result type in closures, which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.
Despite being this close to the solution, I somehow again wound up propagating generics back at least four functions.
I ended up not writing any generic-based stuff and resigned to just manually writing each type's implementation out, but I am going to tinker with this again today. Hopefully, I can use your advice.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!
> there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it
Exactly.
I hope we manage to fix that! We're working on making `impl Trait` usable everywhere a type works. I'll check where "return type of a closure" is on the `impl Trait` radar.
https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/213817-t-lan...
> which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.
Would https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/0.3.19/tracing_subscriber... help you?
> Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!
Thank you as well for taking the time to fill in more details!
> Would https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/0.3.19/tracing_subscriber... help you?
Indeed. This is brilliant.
I think even moreso I can understand the sense of Rust feeling too large not because the language itself is, but because there are SO many of these neat tricks and little utility functions that are necessary to express what you want, and it's quite impossible to remember each and every one and how to go back and find them later.
I never worked with low level languages except some university lession, but I think I have good general understanding how a CPU and memory works (just for some context)
But even for educational purposes, using a language with a poor selection of libraries is likely to lead to a bad experience if what you want to produce is working, non-trivial software. Every project includes some "boring" aspects -- such as parsing configuration and data files -- that you won't necessarily enjoy writing from scratch. The overall programming experience is shaped by much more than the design of the language alone.
[Heavy citation needed]
Rust isn't memory safe if and only if:
- You messed up writing safe to unsafe interface (and forgot to sanitize your binary afterwards).
- You tripped one of the few unsound bugs in compiler, which either require washing pointers via allocators or triggering some tangle of traits that runs into compiler bugs
- Somewhere in dependecy tree someone did the one of other things.
That is the definition of a language not being memory-safe. Memory-safety in the language means a guarantee that the resulting program is memory safe, and that you could not mess it up even if you tried.
Taking that to the extreme, it's like saying that a C program isn't memory safe only if you mess up and have UB in your program, something that C program must not have. But C is not a memory safe language precisely because the language doesn't guarantee that. My point is that there's a spectrum here, the goal isn't memory-safety in the language but in the resulting program, and that is usually achieved by some combination of sound guarantees in the language and some care in the code. Of course, languages differ in that balance.
By your definition no language ever would be deemed safe. Even Java/C# has to interface with C. Or you have to write bindings for C libs/ kernel calls.
> But C is not a memory safe language precisely because the language doesn't guarantee that.
C isn't memory safe because it has 212 different ways to cause memory unsafety. And only offers externals runtime tools to deal with it.
I mean Rust will never be perfect due to Rice Theorem. It doesn't have to be either. It's at close to ideal as you can get, without mandating that programmers are perfect (no language errors) or that everything be written in safe Rust (no C bindings).
This is a well known Nirvana fallacy. E.g. If a cure doesn't cure fatal disease in 100% of cases why not let disease take its course?
That's correct. My point is that even if we talk about memory safety only, languages are on a spectrum (e.g. Java programs don't need to use unsafe code as much as Rust programs), and there's always some situations where we don't rely on sound guarantees. In practice, we call languages that easily demarcate their unsafe code "safe languages".
> I mean Rust will never be perfect due to Rice Theorem.
That's nothing to do with Rice's theorem. A language that's completely, 100% memory-safe is not hard to do, but it will need to sacrifice some things that we don't want to sacrifice even for a 100% guarantee of memory safety.
> If a cure doesn't cure fatal disease in 100% of cases why not let disease take its course?
That's not a good analogy for software correctness. A better one would be that every cure has some side-effects. There are languages that, at least in principle, "cure" far, far more than Rust or even Java do, such as ATS or Idris. Why don't we always use them? Because it's hard! What we've gradually learned since the 70s (when a prevailing thought was that we'll have to use proofs to scale software) is that the cost of soundness can be high, and unsound methods (such as tests) are surprisingly effective in practice, and so "more sound guarantees" is not always the best answer. We now believe that for the best correctness per unit of effort we don't want no guarantees at all as in C, and we also don't want to guarantee everything as in ATS, but we're looking for some sweet spots in between. We haven't yet figured out what "the best" sweet spot is or, indeed, if there even is only one.
There's also this paper, "Memory Safety in Ada, SPARK, and Rust"
https://www.adacore.com/papers/memory-safety-in-ada-spark-an...
https://blog.adacore.com/should-i-choose-ada-spark-or-rust-o...
What intrigues me quite a bit relative to the main topic of the HN thread is Low[0]
> Low is not only a language subset, but also a set of F* libraries that model a curated set of C features: the C memory model, stack- and heap-allocated arrays, machine integers, C string literals, and a few system-level functions from the C standard library. Writing in Low, the programmer enjoys the full power of F for proofs and specifications. At compile-time, proofs are erased, leaving only the low-level code to be compiled to C. In short: the code is low-level, but the verification is not.
[0] https://fstarlang.github.io/lowstar/html/Introduction.html#t...
Then you have FreePascal, as FOSS ObjectPascal dialect.
On Apple's turf, Swift naturally, given its bindings for all Metal anything frameworks.
and the related discussion https://lobste.rs/s/c3dbkh
Serious total MSLs that have a defined memory model to allow "low level" operations seem to be scarce if not any. Hence I do not think there is any single one that comes between C/Zig and Rust.
I would have said https://www.hylo-lang.org/ but, personal opinion, seems like there is too much going on as well. See also https://vale.dev/
P.S Mind mentioning what FP-like features are in Rust? (Genuinely have not looked into Rust that much but I am interested).
I don't remember specifics, but there are some odd footguns to look out for.
I am not sure however I like the verbosity of it where if you are using 'raw' editors without snippet support, it becomes a chore very soon.
All in all it is nice to use and play around with.
If you want the simplicity of C with more safety, maybe tooling like Frama-C, a MISRA C conformance checker, or just aggressive use of static and dynamic analysis tools like ASAN and UBSAN. You can also disable certain optimizations (e.g., strict aliasing) to steer away from some of the major pitfalls of UB.
ASP[0] was old way to do character animations for unix finger command .plan.
Recall HN post using python to do the same (handled animation independent of serial terminal speed).
Related HN post "John Carmack's .plan file" [3]
hascii mation [1]; Use standard graphics techniques and run through [2] or .plan with unscii[4]
"sheltered code" via mindcraft : https://youtu.be/7sNge0Ywz-M
------
ascii animation tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5v-NS9o4yc
[0] :Ah, ASP link has been merged with /dev/null. :(
ASP and related things for animated .plan : https://superuser.com/questions/253308/scrolling-plan-file
[2] : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/converting-image-ascii-image-p...
[3] : "John Carmack's .plan file" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3367230\
[4] : unscii : http://viznut.fi/unscii/
codr7•9h ago
A programming language is always going to make some kind of compromise; better at some things, worse at others.
Simplicity/power and safety pull the design in different directions.
hyperbrainer•9h ago
codr7•9h ago
But at the same time, I'm pretty sure that smaller/simpler is going to mean less safe.
uecker•8h ago
hyperbrainer•8h ago
SkiFire13•8h ago
I don't think the "complicated" is part of the philosophy. Rather the idea is that a "strong" type system should ensure safety. The general consequence of this however is that the language becomes quite restricting and limiting. Hence the need for more more complex feature that allow for greater expressibility.