this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/linuxmemes
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Rust is heresy. Everything should be mutable, the way that God intended it to be!

Seriously though as someone who has mainly done embedded work for decades and got used to constrained environments, the everything is immutable paradigm seems clunky and inelegant. I don't want to copy everything all the time.

Now if you'll excuse me, these null pointers aren't going to dereference themselves

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You seem to have gotten a wrong impression there. Rust absolutely has mutability: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/scope/borrow/mut.html

I would even go so far that Rust is making mutability fashionable again.
More modern languages had generally kind of ousted mutability, but as you say, that means tons of copying, which was a no-go for Rust's performance goals.

So, they looked for ways to allow for mutability without it being a footgun. As such, Rust's mutability handling differs from many other languages in that:

  • It's practically always explicit when something is mutable.
  • Whether something is mutable is associated with the variable binding rather than the data type. This means you can temporarily opt into mutability (if you have ownership of that variable).
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I was more referring to the fact that everything is immutable by default. As someone who's just starting to get old (40) and literally grew up with C, it's just ingrained in me that a variable is... Variable.

If I want a variable to be immutable I would declare it const, and I'm just not used to the opposite. So when playing with Rust, the tutorial said that "most people find themselves fighting with the borrow checker" and sure enough, that's what I ended up doing!

I like the concepts behind it, it really encourages writing safe code, and I feel like it's not just going to be a fad language but will likely end up underlying secure systems of the future. Linux kernel rewrite in Rust when?

It's just that personally I don't have the flow of writing code like I would in C/++, just not used to it. The scoping, the way you pass variables and can sort of "use up a reference" so it's not available anymore just feels cumbersome compared to just passing &memory_location and getting on with it, lol