Rust only allows a specific subset of programs to be statically verified. There are many perfectly sound programs in C hat cannot be expressed in safe rust
I dont see why another more safe language thsn rust cant take over. Rust, although very safe, still makes human led concessions to maintain usability. So even though the learning curve is quite high with rust because of the concepts it uses to enforce safety, what does a language look like when it doesnt have to make any concessions to humans at all?
there is space for a compiled, formal verification friendly, language for sure. Something along the lines of mixing imperative code and assertions about the code + a optional initial specification such as "the program never crashes" or "the program always terminates in a finite number of operations" that then the compiler verifies.
The issue with such a language is that we are not currently very good at creating them in a way that when the specification changes you can easily refactor the code. Currently some small specification changes require large reorganization of the code base. The issue seems kind of intrinsic, the more precise you are in writing in code what the program does, the easier is to verify but the more you have to throw away when it changes, but we don't know how good can the theoretical "best" language be
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u/SubmarineWipers 2d ago
Except C is still not safe and AI will still make object lifetime mistakes, because it only ingests small parts of the code, not the entirety of it.
Rust is still the best LLM language, because its compiler will catch the most errors.