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taneqtoday at 11:49 AM3 repliesview on HN

I’m reminded of the hierarchy of controls in machine safety. If you can’t eliminate the hazard, or substitute a less hazardous thing, then engineering out the hazard (like Rust did) is preferable to a procedural control (“git gud at engineering”).


Replies

entropetoday at 12:24 PM

Can you elaborate on the distinction between "eliminate the hazard" as the first choice and "engineering out the hazard" as a fallback approach?

In my safety background (recently aerospace, ARP4754/4761), removing and avoiding the hazard are essentially equivalent, with reducing the likelihood and mitigating its effects acceptable if you can't remove or avoid the hazard, and procedure is also the least preferred mechanism.

skydhashtoday at 12:07 PM

C/C++ does not care and they’re currently the language for foundational work (OS, platforms, and libraries). Python and Java does not care, they will just throw runtime exceptions and crash. Rust care, but they don’t play well with the rest of the world.

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krater23today at 1:59 PM

C/C++ with static code analysis is not worse than Rust. But most Rust developers are beginners during there are many C/C++ developers with 20+ years knowledge. So whats exactly is the point in using Rust?