Re: Intervention needed?

[Olivier Henley <olivier.henley@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at 5:10:31 AM UTC-4, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> So, seriously - what's wrong with pointers in Rust?

From that excerpt by Oliver Scherer (Rust compiler contributor), it looks like the ownership aspect that comes with them is a real improvement:

"The two (obviously not a good amount of datapoints) large scale refactorings in Ada software that I've been part of have resulted in horrible hacks where people just spammed protected and pragma everywhere to get stuff working and bug free. The protected injections are because it's nearly impossible to figure out which things are accessed by multiple tasks without SPARK and you end up with undefined behaviour if you accidentally have a shared access to an unprotected memory location. The pragmas were reconfiguring things like stack size or disabling compiler warnings without actually thinking about what these changes meant.

Refactorings in Rust on the other hand are (compile-time) guaranteed to be free of race conditions, no matter how crazy you move stuff around or create new parallelism. Additionally the ownership concept lead to many libraries typestate encoding their API which makes misusing them a near impossibility (at compile-time) while Ada mainly catches those misuses at runtime via exceptions."

> My personal argument would be that their syntax and learning curve behind the involved idioms are making the code very difficult to comprehend. But this is the rational argument that was not mentioned here

Right. I did mention the equivalent on the Rust forum: 

"I fail to understand how the requiring of such [implicit knowledge](http://squidarth.com/rc/rust/2018/05/31/rust-borrowing-and-ownership.html) to achieve so little is desirable in any production environment?" 

Personally I plan to read the 'The Book' to see if those idioms are really 'hinderers' but also to know more about Rust.