On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 2:31 PM, Daniel Micay <danielmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22/06/14 05:09 PM, Rick Richardson wrote: > > Apologies if this has been suggested, but would it be possible to have a > > compiler switch that can add runtime checks and abort on > > overflow/underflow/carry for debugging purposes, but the default > > behavior is no check? IMO this would be the best of both worlds, > > because I would assume that one would really only care about checked > > math during testing and dev. > > You would need to build an entirely separate set of standard libraries > with checked overflow. Adding new dialects of the language via compiler > switches is never the right answer. It seems that every time an issue > like this comes up, people propose making a compiler switch as the option. > > If we had compiler switches for abort vs. unwinding, no tracing gc > support vs. tracing gc support, no integer overflow checks vs. integer > overflow checks and more, we would have a truly ridiculous number of > language dialects. I think even 2 dialects is too much... > I am very skeptical about the idea having a single set of standard libraries that are good for everyone. If Rust ever gains any degree of mainstream adoption, I predict that there *will* be switches to disable bounds checks, stack overflow checks, etc, because different applications have different needs. Modern C++ compilers often have a bunch of runtime checks (stack overflow protectors, iterator invalidation detectors, and so on) that may be enabled or disabled, and nobody bats an eye at that.
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