No, I haven't done any skydiving. After writing my comment, I suspected my analogy might not hold up if I knew more about skydiving. I guess just imagine an abstract form of skydiving where you just need to have fun in the sky and then open your chute at the right altitude, and you'd like to wait as long as you can before opening it.
I still think the point is valid, though, even if the analogy isn't.
Fair enough. I'm sorry about calling you out on the metaphor. Instead I'll call you out on the point itself :-)
> Having safety features that you know you can rely on allows you to take risks that you normally wouldn't in order to accomplish some really awesome things.
Unless you rush to publish a public facing version of your code, I can't see why you'd be afraid to take risks in any language. What's so scary about a buffer overflow on your home workstation running data from a source that's never even seen your program? It will just segfault, which is no worse than a Rust panic. If I could exploit your new code, it means I've already gotten so far into your workstation or server that I could just run my own code. Where does the fear come from?
I think it's more like: since you know the compiler won't let you write a buffer overflow, use-after-free, data race, etc., you no longer have to waste time worrying about whether your code might contain such problems, which frees up more mental bandwidth for other concerns. But unlike other languages, you still have confidence that your code will compile to equally performant machine code (e.g. No GC overhead).
The scary thing isn't causing a segfault on your local machine. The scary thing is writing code that could segfault but doesn't do in testing until after you've deployed it publicly. If your compiler rejects code that can segfault, this is no longer a concern. (Or replace segfault with a buffer overflow that leaks your private keys or something equally bad.)
I guess the analogy would be that you can have more fun cavorting across the sky if you knew with 100% confidence that your parachute automatically would deploy itself at the appropriate time (and not a moment sooner).
> I think it's more like: since you know the compiler won't let you write a buffer overflow, use-after-free, data race, etc., you no longer have to waste time worrying about whether your code might contain such problems, which frees up more mental bandwidth for other concerns.
I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to do completely mundane things in Rust. At this point, buffer overflows and use-after-frees are not my biggest concerns in C++.
> The scary thing isn't causing a segfault on your local machine. The scary thing is writing code that could segfault but doesn't do in testing until after you've deployed it publicly. If your compiler rejects code that can segfault, this is no longer a concern.
If your testing didn't catch the problem (which I can fully understand), a panic at runtime is not much different than a segfault.
> (Or replace segfault with a buffer overflow that leaks your private keys or something equally bad.)
I firmly believe the OpenSLL team would've used unsafe blocks in Rust to disable the performance overhead of bounds checking. That whole exploit was caused by sloppy optimizations, and Rust is not immune from that.
> I've spent a lot of time figuring out how to do completely mundane things in Rust. At this point, buffer overflows and use-after-frees are not my biggest concerns in C++.
I could visit a country with a completely different set of laws regarding driving and a different road marking system. After a few days of driving, I might also feel like I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to navigate the rules of the road rather than actually getting to my destination when compared to driving in my native lang. I would also be unable to accurately ascertain whether one system was better than the other, because of inadequate experience with the new system. It would be a mistake to assume that I could become proficient enough in such a complex system in such a short period of time as to ascertain whether one was better than the other.
To put it another way, I don't feel like avoiding bicyclists is my biggest problem when driving, but having a dedicated bike lane at all times would probably be a good idea anyways. Sure, maybe you've never hit a cyclist, and never will. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen enough that we shouldn't do something about it, because it does.
> If your testing didn't catch the problem (which I can fully understand), a panic at runtime is not much different than a segfault.
No, a segfault at runtime is something that is possibly exploitable. A Panic is not.
> I firmly believe the OpenSLL team would've used unsafe blocks in Rust to disable the performance overhead of bounds checking.
Even if they did, that would still reduce the portion of the code that needs to be audited to those blocks. Effort could be made to reduce the size and scope of those blocks. There is something to be said for having the ability to categorize and enforce different safety levels in your codebase, when the alternative is no categorization or enforcement.
> I could visit a country with a completely different set of laws regarding driving [...]
Arguments by metaphor aren't my thing. It's very likely I would become more proficient at Rust if I programmed in it more. It's also very likely the poster above would worry less about memory errors if s/he programmed in C or C++ more. Yes, Rust is safer in some ways, but I still can't understand where all the fear of other languages comes from.
> having a dedicated bike lane at all times would probably be a good idea anyways.
I used to live in a city with a lot of dedicated bike lanes. I commuted to work on a particularly long stretch that was very popular for cycling. The majority of the cyclists refused to ride in the lane. It turns out that cars naturally blow the dust and small pebbles out of the main road way, but bikes don't do that in the bike lane. Cars also smooth out the pavement in their tire tracks. The result was a road that's 5 foot narrower for cars (speed limit 45 mph) with bicyclists in it (not moving 45 mph), a generally unused bike lane, lots of uncomfortable passing, and a lot of indignation from cyclists who claimed an equal right of way despite having a separate lane designated for them.
> Sure, maybe you've never hit a cyclist, and never will. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen enough that we shouldn't do something about it, because it does.
The city I live in now has many bike paths, completely separate from major roads. It's also a different climate, so there are less pebbles and they have street sweepers clean the road after snow season to remove the sand. There really doesn't seem to be much interaction between the cyclists and the cars. So should I choose a programming language with bike lanes on major roads or separate paths though the parkways? :-)
> No, a segfault at runtime is something that is possibly exploitable. A Panic is not.
Anything is possible, but it's very unlikely. I will write a program and intentionally put a buffer overflow in it. Can you send me some data that will exploit it?
Here's a metaphor that also isn't one: I'm not afraid of terrorists despite some high profile events in the last 20 years. I certainly wouldn't optimize my life around avoiding terrorist attacks because the empirical evidence shows me the probability is very low.
> It's very likely that I would become more proficient at Rust if I programmed in it more. It's also very likely that the poster above would worry less about memory errors if s/he programmed in C or C++ more.
> The city I live in now has many bike paths, completely separate from major roads.
Which wasn't the point of that at all. It was to point out that you assessment of how much time is wasted working around problems in each case is irrelevant given your vastly different experience levels. There are plenty of people here with quite a bit of C and C++ experience that have weighed in about this, not just the person above who you assess as not having much experience in C or C++.
A bike path is a dedicated bike lane,just not necessarily parallel to the road. You're taking the metaphor too literally to be useful. A metaphor is as useful as you allow it to be. They can be extremely useful in pointing out somewhat parallel situations where people may find their beliefs are different. When that is so, it allows the people involved to examine what is different about the situations that leads to a different opinion, if anything. Sometimes we fall prey to our cognitive biases, and a metaphor can be a shortcut out of that bias if it exists, and you allow it be that shortcut. Driving it into irrelevancy through focusing on minutiae is a useful rhetorical trick, but doesn't actually advance the conversation, and at the extreme end if done purposefully is not acting in good faith.
> Anything is possible, but it's very unlikely. I will write a program and intentionally put a buffer overflow in it. Can you send me some data that will exploit it?
Depending on the segfault? I could. It would take me a lot of work, because it's been nearly 15 years since I paid much attention to that, but I have done it before.
> Here's a metaphor that also isn't one: I'm not afraid of terrorists despite some high profile events in the last 20 years. I certainly wouldn't optimize my life around avoiding terrorist attacks because the empirical evidence shows me the probability is very low.
No, you don't optimize your life around them, but you might also support checking of identities on international flights to prevent access to your nation from known terrorists.
Here's the thing. It's not about you. At any point in time, some percentage of C and C++ programmers are neophytes that may not be as proficient as you at avoiding the pitfalls possible in those languages. Given the average amount of time it takes someone to be proficient in C or C++, divided by the average career length of a programmer of those languages, and you'll have a rough estimate of what percentage of programmers of those languages we might conceivably have to deal with problems from them being inadequate for the job they are assigned. I think that reducing this has such a large impact, that this is of vast benefit to society at large (given the botnets we are currently seeing), and would total billions of dollars.
An accurate diagnosis, I think. You'll never get anywhere with people like that ... or where you get is not anywhere you want to be. In this case, you have someone arguing against Rust because a) his coworkers don't bother to free memory because their programs will finish soon and b) because he doesn't care whether toy programs that he writes for his home computer are subject to buffer overflow exploits.
And on top of that was missing the point of your analogies that, if not willful, was certainly convenient. To use another one: some people are like quicksand.
> > The city I live in now has many bike paths, completely separate from major roads.
> Which wasn't the point of that at all. It was to point out that you[r] assessment of how much time is wasted working around problems in each case is irrelevant given your vastly different experience levels.
That was almost my exact point, and it's odd you're repeating it back to me. I guess I could've laid it out more plainly.
> [Metaphors] Driving it into irrelevancy through focusing on minutiae is a useful rhetorical trick. [...] at the extreme end if done purposefully is not acting in good faith
Using a metaphor is a rhetorical trick. If you want to explain something to a non-technical audience, maybe analogies "get the hay down to the horses" so they can have at least a limited understanding. However, we both seem to understand programming languages so talking about roads obfuscates the discussion, leaving me to wonder whether there really is a parallel between the two topics. I know more about programming languages than I do about bike paths.
> Depending on the segfault? I could. It would take me a lot of work, because it's been nearly 15 years since I paid much attention to that, but I have done it before.
Even if I offer to run malicious data, it sounds to me like a low probability event - probably lower than my being in an airplane crash or shot by a cop. It's not something I should fear today. Over the last 25 years, I've had lots of segfaults, but I think I've done the most damage by accidentally overwriting files. I'm a little afraid of that.
> No, you don't optimize your life around them, but you might also support checking of identities on international flights to prevent access to your nation from known terrorists.
No, I definitely would not. It's very easy to get into this country, and an organized (dangerous) group would have no more difficulty than the drug dealers do smuggling cocaine. There is no benefit to harassing millions of citizens if you can't actually stop the problem.
> Here's the thing. It's not about you.
Are you suggesting the only people allowed to share their experiences in a thread like this are new programmers and the people pushing their language? I was new once, and I survived lots and lots of segfaults. Don't you think neophytes should hear that? They're definitely getting a large dose of doom and gloom about the bad old days.
> Some percentage of C and C++ programmers are neophytes. [...] I think that reducing this has such a large impact, that this is of vast benefit to society at large (given the botnets we are currently seeing), and would total billions of dollars.
In one of your other comments, you indicated you haven't tried Rust yet. You should - you sound interested. It definitely has its nice parts. However, I don't think you will find the safety features to be a big productivity gain, and you will have to use unsafe code to accomplish tasks from a freshman level computer science book. Think about that - you can't cleanly use the safe subset of Rust to teach computer science to beginners... (you could do it with a lot of compromises)
Rhetorical tricks can be used to deepen the conversation, or to dismiss points out of hand. The first is useful to the discussion, the second is useful for winning, but at the detriment to the discussion.
> However, we both seem to understand programming languages so talking about roads obfuscates the discussion
I provided a example where it may provide value even if two people are experts in the area being discussed. Metaphors can help explain someone underlying reasoning and motivation in a way that is hard to express technically. People talk past each other enough in discussions by slightly misinterpreting what is trying to be expressed, that I find metaphors a valuable tool. I find many disagreements in text are rooted in people assuming a comment is countering a point of their or someone the agree with, and interpreting it in that light when often they are saying very close to the same thing. Thus I believe expressing a point in multiple ways, even if it's through metaphor, to have merit.
> Even if I offer to run malicious data, it sounds to me like a low probability event - probably lower than my being in an airplane crash or shot by a cop.
First, airplane crashes are extremely rare. Second, being shot by a cop is rare too, depending on your vocation and behavior. Third, remote code execution exploits are not rare, given the relatively small amount of public facing software compared to airplane flights an all police interactions.[1] Were you to author or contribute to any non-trivial size C or C++ project that was publicly available, I would put better than even money on there being an exploit findable in it. There's a vast difference in how much software is written to how much is public facing, but that doesn't mean things that were originally private don't sometimes make their way public years later, for example internal libraries that a company open sources or even just includes in another project that ends up being public facing.
> No, I definitely would not. It's very easy to get into this country, and an organized (dangerous) group would have no more difficulty than the drug dealers do smuggling cocaine. There is no benefit to harassing millions of citizens if you can't actually stop the problem.
So, again, because you can render a metaphor in more detail to make it irrelevant in context doesn't mean that's appropriate. So, in more generic terms, "do you support keeping known detrimental people out of a defined area to facilitate the usefulness of that area"? If can can do so, and it's not to cumbersome on those that are not detrimental, depending on the problems caused by the people in question, at some point it becomes worth it. There are parallels that can be drawn here, if you're willing to entertain the thought. It appears you aren't.
> Are you suggesting the only people allowed to share their experiences in a thread like this are new programmers and the people pushing their language?
No, I'm expressing that a single person't ability to avoid negative behavior has little bearing in an argument regarding community norms and herd behavior, which is what I'm getting at. Whether you are a perfect programmer and never make a single mistake in any language you use doesn't matter when discussing the merits of enforced safety in general as in this discussion regarding C and C++. What does matter is whether other programmers in general do, and what percentage of them, which you've also made a point of expressing. I think that is worth discussing, because I think we either disagree on the proportion of those programmers that can code with adequate safety, or some other facet of them that results in them yielding far more problematic code every year than you think they are producing.
> In one of your other comments, you indicated you haven't tried Rust yet.
I've tried it. I haven't done more than dabble though, while playing it futures-rs. I understand the borrow checker is cumbersome at my level of uncerstanding, and I fought with it. I don't think I have sufficient experience to make an assessment of the language personally based on my level of experience with it, and especially not with how it feels to write in comparison to C or C++, because I strive to avoid using those languages.
> However, I don't think you will find the safety features to be a big productivity gain, and you will have to use unsafe code to accomplish tasks from a freshman level computer science book.
I believe have the ability to define safe and unsafe portions of code is in itself laudable and useful. Allowing me to categorize possibly problematic portions of code is a benefit. In any case, I could essentially write the entire program in an unsafe block and have a C/C++ alike with a different syntax. I'm not sure how "unsafe" can be presented as a downside, when it's strictly a way to enforce separation of a feature that C and C++ don't have.
> Think about that - you can't cleanly use the safe subset of Rust to teach computer science to beginners... (you could do it a lot of compromises)
What, you can't use that explicit separation of what is known safe and known unsafe to point out computational problems and ways they can be solved? I find that hard to believe. Unless you think unsafe is Rust but "lesser, not really". It isn't. It's part of the language. It exists as a concession that sometimes things are needed that can't be proven safe by the compiler, but you may be able to prove to yourself it is.
You seem like a forthright person, but with or without metaphors, we're still talking past each other.
My point about remote exploits, airplane crashes, and cops is not about me. Yes, public facing software needs to be careful, but (fun metaphor) that's like saying prostitutes should use condoms. Web servers, browsers, firewalls, and the like are built specifically to communicate with untrusted entities. That's some of the most promiscuous software out there, and yes it gets exploited. But most people don't need to use condoms with their wives, and nobody is going to exploit software a newbie wrote and runs on his home computer. Safety should not be the fundamental criteria for a newbie programmer to choose a language and learn how to write fibonacci or hello world. When they're ready to write nginx, then they should be careful.
My point about the questionable productivity gain and safety was a reply to your estimate of the billions of dollars lost. If you're not more productive, and you aren't really safe, then you aren't going to save those billions.
> What, you can't use that explicit separation of what is known safe and known unsafe to point out computational problems and ways they can be solved? I find that hard to believe.
I didn't say anything like that. We're talking past each other.
> Unless you think unsafe is Rust but "lesser, not really". It isn't. It's part of the language.
(Metaphor time again) I've got a really safe bicycle. When the safety is on, children can't get hurt while riding it. If you care about the safety of the world's children, they should use my new safer bicycle. Oh, but you can't pedal it on paths I don't provide unless you disable the safety. Is my bike really that safe?
I have no idea how many people compiled and ran a program today. It's probably millions. Bayes's theorem might be a useful way to normalize that long list you linked. I don't see a single program from a home programmer on that list.
> Unless you think unsafe is Rust but "lesser, not really". ... It's part of the language ... sometimes things are needed that can't be proven safe by the compiler, but you may be able to prove to yourself it is.
This. Unsafe is to the borrow checker as 'Any' is to the typechecker.
Perhaps a better analogy would be the way that much of modern medicine is enabled by access to antibiotics. Without antibiotics, the risk of post-operation death by infection would be so high as to rule out many of the procedures that we now consider safe and routine.
I would prefer a surgeon who washed his hands over one who didn't but gave me antibiotics. I've had stitches a few times, but only one real surgery. I never got antibiotics for any of those. Maybe we could skip the analogies? I don't think they help the discussion.
I still think the point is valid, though, even if the analogy isn't.