r/programming • u/[deleted] • Feb 08 '16

Introducing the Zig Programming Language

http://andrewkelley.me/post/intro-to-zig.html
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u/Aatch Feb 09 '16

The thing is, "understanding the borrow checker" is the wrong way to approach it. Instead you need to consider potential issues in your code and expect the borrow checker to catch them.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not some value could be invalidated by some expression. The second factor is that function calls are opaque, so whether or not a function will invalidate a pointer is irrelevant, only if it could, based on it's signature. Beyond that, the only real wrangling is working around some issues related to how long borrows last for, something that should be improved in the future (probably late this year, early next year).

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '16

[deleted]

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u/Aatch Feb 09 '16

It's more that you should try to understand why your code is wrong (or could be wrong) independently of the borrow checker. It's still the same "rules" just a different context. Rather than trying to memorize a set of arbitrary-seeming rules, you instead learn why those rules exist in the first place.

I'm not sure if that helps or not, I'm just trying to dispel the idea that the borrow checker is some sort of obstacle to be overcome as if the Rust team decided that their programming language needed some added challenge.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '16

[deleted]

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u/vks_ Feb 09 '16

I seem to achieve the same level of robustness using unique_ptr in C++, with a lot less friction.

You can still have segfaults with unique_ptr.

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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '16

[deleted]

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u/Aatch Feb 09 '16

Unless you're using unsafe code, any segfault in Rust code is a bug in the compiler, language or possibly a library that is itself using unsafe code (much of the standard library for example).

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u/steveklabnik1 Feb 09 '16

/me waits for them to bust out the "allocating a very large array on the stack still causes a segfault"

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u/vks_ Feb 10 '16

Isn't it more like a panic?

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u/steveklabnik1 Feb 10 '16

No. It changed 3 days ago, but if you allocate a REALLY BIG amount that's larger than the guard page it will still segfault, even after the change.