topics Rust

I really like Jack Wrenn’s new article “The Three Basic Rules of Safety Hygiene,” which covers how to handle unsafe code when you have to write it, through a hygiene checklist for expressing and validating compliance with safety conditions in the code.

Rust’s goal is not to eliminate unsafe code, but to contain it in isolated modules you can audit and which provide safe interaces to external users. Sometimes unsafety is necessary, and having a process for how to handle that unsafety is a key development.

Research on how to reduce things like industrial accidents, medical incidents, and airplane crashes all consistently find that checklists and procedures work. Humans are fallible, and being accountable to a checklist or a process defends against our propensity to make mistakes.

Amid the move to memory safe languages, the people who build and build on C and C++ ought to be recognized. Any of us could be hit by an upheaval of technology in which we’ve invested.

Rust types offer four ways to decide what happens next, along two axes: deciding at runtime vs. compile time, and permitting a closed or open set of types.

The systems we build are manifestations of our politics. So what is the philosophy of Rust and what does it offer for the state of software?

Rust generics can trade off binary size for expressiveness. Learning to identify when the trade isn’t worth it is a valuable skill that can help you write better code.

Rust has many pairs of string types, each with a distinct purpose. Understanding those purposes helps with understanding Rust itself.