Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”

rhabarba@feddit.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 429 points – Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”
arstechnica.com

Linux people doing Linux things, it seems.

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"safe by default" can be done by starting your files with @safe:

Last time I heard about that it was much more limited than Rust, for example it even disallowed taking references to local variables. Has something changed since then?

D has many memory safety features. For local variables, one should use pointers, otherwise ref does references that are guaranteed to be valid to their lifetime, and thus have said limitations.

For local variables, one should use pointers, otherwise ref does references that are guaranteed to be valid to their lifetime, and thus have said limitations.

Should I take this to mean that pointers instead are not guaranteed to be valid, and thus are not memory safe?

Pointers are not guaranteed to be safe. DIP1000 was supposed to solve the issue of a pointer referencing to a now expired variable (see example below), but it's being replaced by something else instead.

int* p;
{
  int q = 42;
  p = &q;
}
writeln(*p);     //ERROR: This will cause memory leakage, due to q no longer existing

Pointers are not guaranteed to be safe

So I guess they are forbidden in @safe mode?

but it's being replaced by something else instead

Do you know what is the replacement? I tried looking up DIP1000 but it only says "superceded" without mentioning by what.

This makes me wonder how ready D is for someone that wants to extensively use @safe though.