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Programming Languages

Rust is interesting because it occupies contentious programming language territory: it attempts to graft lots of semantic type information to previously unencoded ideas of memory sharing semantics. Why? Because developers likely can't be trusted with memory management in any form. This borrow checking enforces a very consistent, cohesive style across Rust programs; memory can only be shared in a particular fashion, which impacts the data flow architecture of your entire application.

Jon Blow's Entity systems and the Rust borrow checker … or something and Ideas about a new programming language for games talks are essentially rants against Rust; he claims that manual memory management is fine and necessary for being ergonomic, that exception-based control flow can be useful, etc. The talks are worth skipping around throuhg on 2x speed to get the gist - they're rants, really, with a couple of legitimate nuggets of information.

Despite claims about not having a runtime, Rust does! Even if compiled without runtime, we do have some setup for generating threads and such; this is particularly necessary for allowing code to actually run on Windows systems.

This fun hack, Rust in an instant, shows how you can easily redefine libc functions, then link with them, in the same file - as Rust knows to link with some C function with some name, and it can also provide C functions with those names.

Five years of Rust - a cross-platform programming language for the next decad… is a huge Rust puff piece enumerating the good parts. Probably phrased better than I could! But always remember that strong type systems come at the cost of programmer brain. They're nice for serious production work, but not necessary for prototyping. Rewriting in Rust is good, but I'm not sure if the first draft has to be.

https://tiemoko.com/blog/blue-team-rust/: What does memory management mean for Rust? Great take from a security perspective.

Polonius contains the algorithm that specifies the Rust borrow checker; if you're interested in a deep dive, this is absolutely the place to start.

The Pain Of Linear Types In Rust - Faultlore is a type-theoretic investigation of Rust's type system, an explanation of why it is not actually linear, and elaborates on the pain that a real linear type system would cause in Rust.

Bryan Cantrill on Rust and Why He Feels It’s The Biggest Change in Systems De…

Rust replacements for standard tools are quite popular. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=A65w-qoyTYg: zero-cost copy in Rust! The Rust Embedded Book elaborates on methods for writing embedded software in Rust.

GitHub - doctorn/trait-eval: We all know Rust's trait system is Turing comple… GitHub - rust-lang/datafrog: A lightweight Datalog engine in Rust