On 3/28/14 5:25 AM, Tommi wrote:
On 28 Mar 2014, at 05:56, Patrick Walton <[email protected]> wrote:
I think that Rust should give you the ability to opt out of safety, but on a
per-operation basis. Having it as a compiler option is too much of a
sledgehammer: often you want some non-performance-critical bounds to be checked
in the name of safety, while you want some bounds checks to be turned off.
One other argument I can give for a "sledgehammer" feature like this
is that it can be used as a marketing tool against people who are
worried about performance. You can say to those people: "Look, if, at
the end of the day, you decide that you'd rather take raw speed over
safety, then there's this compiler flag you can use to disable all
runtime memory safety checking in your code and get performance on
par with C++".
Well, people who would be persuaded by that would probably also want the
borrow check off, and might want the mutability restrictions off too. It
just wouldn't be the same language.
It might be interesting to try to design a systems language with no
regard for safety and the other modern/functional programming goodies
that Rust has (concepts/traits, algebraic data types, a module system),
but Rust just isn't that language. Safety-by-default is core to its design.
Patrick
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