Productivity of Rust teams at Google

@[email protected] · edit-2 9 months ago

Productivity of Rust teams at Google

@[email protected] · 9 months ago

For instance it wasn’t immediately clear that those statements get evaluated in reverse order

It’s a stack, just like Go’s defer().

scope(success) and scope(failure) are far more interesting as I’m not aware of a direct equivalent in Rust

Probably because Rust doesn’t have exceptions, and I’m pretty sure there are no guarantees with panic!().

Ultimately, while it is interesting, I’m actually happy Rust doesn’t have that feature in it

Same, but that’s because Rust’s semantics are different. It’s nice to have the option if RAII isn’t what you want for some reason (it usually is), but I absolutely won’t champion it since it just adds bloat to the language for something that can be solved another way.

@orclev · 9 months ago

Probably because Rust doesn’t have exceptions

Well, it has something semantically equivalent while being more explicit, which is Result (just like Option is the semantic equivalent of null).

and I’m pretty sure there are no guarantees with panic!().

I actually do quite a bit of bare metal Rust work so I’m pretty familiar with this. There are sort of guarantees with panic. You can customize the panic behavior with a panic_handler function, and you can also somewhat control stack unwinding during a panic using std::panic::catch_unwind. The later requires that anything returned from it implement the UnwindSafe trait which is sort of like a combination Send + Sync. That said, Rust very much does not want you to regularly rely on stack unwinding. Anything that’s possible to recover from should use Result rather than panic!() to signal a failure state.

@[email protected] · 9 months ago

Yup. My point is just that scope(failure) could be problematic because of the way Rust works with error handling.

What could maybe be cool is D’s in/out contracts (example pulled from here):

int fun(ref int a, int b)
in
{
    assert(a > 0);
    assert(b >= 0, "b cannot be negative!");
}
out (r)
{
    assert(r > 0, "return must be positive");
    assert(a != 0);
}
do
{
    // function body
}

The scope(failure) could partially be solved with the out contract. I also don’t use this (I find it verbose and distracting), but maybe that line of thinking could be an interesting way to generically handle errors.

@orclev · 9 months ago

Hmm… I think the Rust-y answer to that problem is the same as the Haskell-y answer, “Use the Types!”. I.E. in the example above instead of returning an i32 you’d return a NonZero<u32>, and your args would be a: &NonZero<u32>, b: u32. Basically make invalid state unrepresentable and then you don’t need to worry about the API being used wrong.

@[email protected] · 9 months ago

I’m more referring to a more general application, such as:

fn do_stuff() -> Result<...> {
    if condition {
        return Error(...)
    }

    return Ok(...)
} out (r) {
    if r.is_err() {
        // special cleanup (maybe has access to fn scope vars)
    }
}

That gives you some of the scope(failure) behavior, without as many footguns. Basically, it would desugar to:

fn do_stuff() -> Result<...> {
    let ret = if condition { Error(...) } else { Ok(eee) };

    if ret.is_err() {
        ...
    }

I’m not proposing this syntax, just suggesting that something along these lines may be interesting.

@orclev · edit-2 9 months ago

I think the issue with that is that it’s a little bit of a solution in search of a problem. Your example of:

fn do_stuff() -> Result<...> {
    if condition {
        return Error(...)
    }

    return Ok(...)
} out (r) {
    if r.is_err() {
        // special cleanup (maybe has access to fn scope vars)
    }
}

isn’t really superior in any meaningful way (and is arguably worse in some ways) to:

fn do_stuff() -> Result<...> {
    if condition {
        // special cleanup (maybe has access to fn scope vars)
        return Error(...)
    }

    return Ok(...)
}

For more complicated error handling the various functions on Result probably have all the bases covered.

For what it’s worth a lot of my day to day professional work is actually in Java and our code base has adopted various practices inspired by Rust and Haskell. We completely eliminated null from our code and use Optional everywhere and use a compile time static analysis tool to validate that. As for exception handling, we’re using the Reactor framework which provides a type very similar to Result, and we essentially never directly throw or catch exceptions any more, it’s all handled with the functions Reactor provides for error handling.

I just don’t think the potential footguns introduced by null and exceptions are worth it, the safer type level abstractions of Option and Result are essentially superior to them in every way.

@[email protected] · edit-2 9 months ago

We completely eliminated null from our code

Nice. We use Python and use None everywhere. I ran pyright on our codebase, and while we use typing religiously, our largest microservice has ~6k typing errors, most of which are unchecked Nones. We also use exceptions quite a bit, which sucks (one thing really annoys me is a function like check_permissions() which returns nothing, and throws if there’s an issue, but it could totally just return a bool. We have nonsense like that everywhere.

I use Rust for all of my personal projects and love not having to deal with null everywhere. I’d push harder for it at work if others were interested, but I’m the only one who seems passionate about it (about 2-3 are “interested,” but haven’t even done the tutorial).

@orclev · edit-2 9 months ago

Yeah as far as I’m concerned null is public enemy number one. I refuse to work in any language that doesn’t allow me to indicate in some fashion that a variable is non-nullable. I just about had an aneurysm when I found out that JavaScript not only has null, but also nil and undefined and they all mean something subtly different. To be fair though, JavaScript is like a greatest hits of bad language design.

@[email protected] · 9 months ago

JavaScript doesn’t have nil, but it has null, NaN and undefined.

But yeah, wrapping null in an Option is a really nice.