alt Hacker News> languages where "trivial" things "just require" rapidly become "not so trivial" in the aggregate
Sure. And in C and Zig, it's "trivial" to make a global mutable variable, it "just requires" you to flawlessly uphold memory access invariants manually across all possible concurrent states of your program.
Stop beating around the bush. Rust is just easier than nearly any other language for writing concurrent programs, and it's not even close (though obligatory shout out to Erlang).
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> it "just requires" you to flawlessly uphold memory access invariants manually across all possible concurrent states of your program.
No it doesn't. Zig doesn't require you to think about concurrency at all. You can just not do concurrency.
> Stop beating around the bush. Rust is just easier than nearly any other language for writing concurrent programs
This is entirely unrelated to the problem of defining shared global state.
var x: u64 = 10;
Rust (and you) makes an assertion that all code should be able to run in a concurrent context. Code that passes that assertion may be more portable than code that does not.
What is important for you to understand is: code can be correct under a different set of assertions. If you assert that some code will not run in a concurrent environment, it can be perfectly correct to create a mutable global variable. And this assertion can be done implicitly (ie: I wrote the program knowing I'm not spawning any threads, so I know this variable will not have shared mutable access).
Funny that you mentioned Erlang since Actors and message passing are tricky to implent in Rust (yes, I’ve seen Tokio). There is a readon why Rust doesnt have a nice GUI library, or a nice game engine. Resources must be shared, and there is more to sharing than memory ownership.
This is really it to me. It's like saying, "look people it's so much easier to develop and build an airplane when you don't have to adhere to any rules". Which of course is true. But I don't want to fly in any of those airplanes, even if they are designed and build by the best and brightest on earth.
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This is a miscommunication between the values of “shipping” which optimizes for fastest time to delivery and “correctness” which optimizes for the quality of the code.
Rust makes it easy to write correct software quickly, but it’s slower for writing incorrect software that still works for an MVP. You can get away with writing incorrect concurrent programs in other languages… for a while. And sometimes that’s what business requires.
I actually wish “rewrite in Rust” was a more significant target in the Rust space. Acknowledging that while Rust is not great for prototyping, the correctness/performance advantages it provides justifies a rewrite for the long-term maintenance of software—provided that the tools exist to ease that migration.