this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Rust

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[–] solrize -1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Checked arithmetic failing should raise an exception like it does in Ada. What happens if you use an out of range array subscript a[n]? Does that always return an option type? Really, these types of errors are rare enough that it's unfeasible to program defensively around the possibility all the time. But they are frequent enough (especially with malicious input) that we've had 50 years of buffer overruns in C, leading to the invention of Rust among other things.

Wrapping and saturating are for special purposes: wrapping for when you're explicitly dealing with computer words (as in bit operations or cryptography) and saturating in some media applications and the like. It's amusing that C in a certain sense is more correct than Rust or Java in this way. Signed arithmetic overflow in C is UB, so the compiler is at least permitted to always check the arithmetic and signal on overflow (use -ftrapv for this). C doesn't have a way to check unsigned overflow. Things were muddled in the 1970s when C was designed ;).

I think it would be an improvement to Rust to fix its arithmetic to work like Ada's.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

What happens if you use an out of range array subscript a[n]? Does that always return an option type?

It never returns an option type. This Index interface happens to be actually noisy as implemented for some std types. Although you can implement it however you like for your own data types (including ones just wrapping the std ones). And we have checked access (example) and unchecked access (example) as methods.

It's actually astonishing the lengths you're taking to NOT learn anything, to the point of just imagining things about Rust that are supposedly done wrong compared to Ada.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

What happens if you use an out of range array subscript a[n]? Does that always return an option type?

I think that you would be surprised by the amount you would learn if you spent five minutes actually trying to answer your own questions, instead of treating them as proof that you just made a relevant point merely by asking them.