mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Andrew Poelstra <apoelstra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 07:59:07PM +0800, Alberto Garcia wrote:
> "As for the language choice being a ‘barrier,’ if it keeps out the type of
> "engineer" who can’t/won’t trouble themselves to learn a new language, then
> I’m happy it's in place"
> Same thing can be said about programmers that don't want to learn how to
> deal with memory, pointers and safe programming (i.e. C++) ... :)
>

"Learning how to deal with memory" is not sufficient to avoid memory bugs.
If Rust is filtering out programmers who believe raw brainpower is a sufficient
defense against a language in which it is impossible to specify code precisely
and for which no compiler will detect obviously-wrong things (and worse,
programmers who think this is a _good_ use of brainpower even if it were
possible) then that is also a good result.

Should we also worry about getting programmers who "don't want to learn how
types work" and need a language in which objects can't silently and arbitrarily
converted between types?

> Speed wise and mostly memory wise Rust is way more inefficient than C/C++.
>

Rust supports all the same memory-management paradigms as C. As near as I can
tell this claim is simply false.
 
> I'm just curious because if this project, as I hope, keeps growing it will
> eventually be difficult to port if needed.
>

Porting to an unsafe language with poor data structure support and weak typing
would IMO be a reckless and pointless thing to do. Porting to another type of
language would be easier from Rust than from C or C++, I expect.

-- 
Andrew Poelstra
Mathematics Department, Blockstream
Email: apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web:   https://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

"A goose alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese
 who can never find their peace,
 whether north or south or west or east"
       --Joanna Newsom

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