On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Richard Hipp <d...@sqlite.org> wrote: > On 10/27/16, David Mason <dma...@ryerson.ca> wrote: >> Fossil seems pretty robust in C, but Rust would increase safety confidence. > > Many people do believe that just because an application is written in > Rust rather than in C that it must be "safer". But it is a logical > fallacy. You should avoid falling into that trap.
I'm not sure if this is logical fallacy, but I think this is statistics. People are producing more dangerous results with dangerous languages than with safer languages. > Rust helps at preventing certain kinds of bugs (null pointer > dereferences, use after free). But those have never been an issue > with Fossil. What about https://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/vinfo/6013aea0c2a5e32c then? > Fossil uses the transactional guarantees of the > underlying SQL database engine to ensure the safety of user data. > Perhaps Rust might be helpful in systems like Git or Hg which depend > on the integrity of the application-level code for data correctness > and safety. But as Fossil has no such dependency, rewriting Fossil in > Rust would not help in any way. Rather than making Fossil "safer", > rewriting it in Rust would simply introduce a bunch of new bugs cause > by the inevitable translation errors. Hmm, I kind of agree that rewriting fossil in Rust will not buy much. In fact what would be needed to see real effect of safety is to rewrite both SQLite and Fossil in Rust, then this may show something... but well, I'm afraid nobody is going to do this kind of experiment just to add some arguments to Rust versus C safety discussion. :-) > Irony: Isn't Rust heavily dependent upon Git for its package > management? So if Hg is written in Rust, does that mean that Hg has a > dependency on Git? I'm afraid that version control used for the language development is irrelevant to the quality of the language itself. Karel _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
