To your above point about paths, it’s things like this that keep me coming back to Rust. This was just one example, but other languages are absolutely littered with pitfalls and gotchas that—individually—aren’t all that likely to happen.
But all of them? Over a given program’s lifetime? In aggregate these end up being responsible for an absolutely wild number of random bugs that crop up in your exception logs that need to get tracked down. And it never ends. There are an infinite number of edge cases you’ve never thought about that aren’t fully handled and that some of which are constantly being tripped.
This just… doesn’t happen in Rust. The type system catches (and/or completely rules out) a ridiculous number of these situations. I have repeatedly written finished software in Rust, where once it was released there was only an occasional need to add features but the typical bug-squashing treadmill just doesn’t exist.
That’s not to say there are never bugs. You can express faulty logic in any language. But the number of stupid impedance matches that are categorically ruled out makes the experience of operating and maintaining Rust program once written a widely different experience than I’ve had with any other language.
I spent months working out all the kinks of a C++ codebase to make up for decades of assumptions about paths and strings and locales that failed to stand up to reality.
The 'difficulty' of Rust would have been preferable, in hindsight.
But all of them? Over a given program’s lifetime? In aggregate these end up being responsible for an absolutely wild number of random bugs that crop up in your exception logs that need to get tracked down. And it never ends. There are an infinite number of edge cases you’ve never thought about that aren’t fully handled and that some of which are constantly being tripped.
This just… doesn’t happen in Rust. The type system catches (and/or completely rules out) a ridiculous number of these situations. I have repeatedly written finished software in Rust, where once it was released there was only an occasional need to add features but the typical bug-squashing treadmill just doesn’t exist.
That’s not to say there are never bugs. You can express faulty logic in any language. But the number of stupid impedance matches that are categorically ruled out makes the experience of operating and maintaining Rust program once written a widely different experience than I’ve had with any other language.