alt Hacker NewsIMO rust started at this from the wrong direction. Comparing to something like zig which just cannot panic unless the developer wrote the thing that does the panic, cannot allocate unless the developer wrote the allocation, etc.
Rust instead has all these implicit things that just happen, and now needs ways to specify that in particular cases, it doesn't.
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> Comparing to something like zig which just cannot panic unless the developer wrote the thing that does the panic
The zig compiler can’t possibly guarantee this without knowing which parts of the code were written by you and which by other people (which is impossible).
So really it’s not “the developer” wrote the thing that does the panic, it’s “some developer” wrote it. And how is that different from rust?
Huh? It seems to me that in these respects the two languages are almost identical. If I tell the program to panic, it panics, and if I divide an integer by zero it... panics and either those are both "the developer wrote the thing" or neither is.
The problem isn't implicit things happening.
He's talking about this problem. Can this code panic?
You can't easily answer that in Rust or Zig. In both cases you have to walk the entire call graph of the function (which could be arbitrarily large) and check for panics. It's not feasible to do by hand. The compiler could do it though.