tialaramex 5 days ago

If that's your preference you're going about it all wrong. Rust's safety is about culture and you're looking at the technology, it's not that Rust doesn't have technology but the technology isn't where you start.

This was the only notable failing of Sean's (abandoned) "Safe C++" - it delivers all the technology a safe C++ culture would have needed, but there is no safe C++ culture so it was waved away as unimportant.

The guy whose mine loses fifty miners in a roof collapse doesn't need better mining technology, inadequate technology isn't why those miners died, culture is. His mine didn't have safety culture, probably because he didn't give shit about safety, and his workers either shared this dismissal or had no choice in the matter.

Also "extreme focus" is a misinterpretation. It's not an extreme focus, it's just mandatory, it's like if you said humans have an "extreme focus" on breathing air, they really don't - they barely even think about breathing air - it was just mandatory so if you don't do it then I guess that stands out.

1
uecker 5 days ago

Let's turn it around: Do you think the mining guy that does not care about safety will start caring about a safety culture because there is a new safety tool? And if it is mandated by government, will it be implemented in a meaningful way, or just on paper?

tialaramex 5 days ago

So there's a funny thing about mouthing the words, the way the human mind works the easiest way to explain to ourselves why we're mouthing the words is that we agree with them. And so in that sense what seems like a useless paper exercise can be effective.

Also, relevantly here, nobody actually wants these terrible bugs. This is not A or B, Red or Blue, this is very much Cake or Death and like, there just aren't any people queueing up for Death, there are people who don't particularly want Cake but that's not the same thing at all.

pjmlp 5 days ago

It will certainly be implemented in a meaningful way, if the consequences for the mining guy are hard enough that there won't be a second failure done by the same person.

Hence why I am so into cybersecurity laws, and if this is the only way to make C and C++ communities embrace a safety culture, instead of downplaying it as straitjacket programming like in the C vs Pascal/Modula-2 Usenet discussion days, then so be it.