On Saturday, 4 January 2014 at 02:09:51 UTC, NoUseForAName wrote:
This piece (recently seen on the Hacker News front page):
http://rust-class.org/pages/using-rust-for-an-undergraduate-os-course.html
.. includes a pretty damning assessment of D as "unsafe"
(compared to Rust) and generally doomed. I remember hearing
Walter Bright talking a lot about "safe code" during a D
presentation. Was that about a different kind of safety? Is the
author just wrong? Basically I want to hear the counterargument
(if there is one).
I'd say Kelet has it right, and I don't think the author has it
wrong either. He goes into the specific issue he has in the
section about Rust:
"Go and D provide memory safety but with all objects being
automatically managed with a garbage collector (over which
languages users have little control). Rust provides a way for
programmers to declare objects that are automatically managed or
explicitly managed, and statically checks that explicitly managed
objects are used safely."
Basically D provides safety, but it also provides means to do
unsafe things. I'm not familiar with Rust, but I wouldn't be
surprised if unsafe actions could also be taken.
