Bronze

Increasingly feeling that Rust is like Elm: a language with novel ideas, teaching valuable lessons (a vocabulary for teaching and checking thread safety, documenting exclusive vs. shared mutability in the type system, arguably a vocabulary for teaching and checking memory safety, though that comes at a steep cost), yet so stubborn the community treats its values (avoiding shared mutability) as moral judgments of code, and the language and deliberately obstructs writing code outside of approved patterns (single ownership tree, exclusive mutability). struct{Cell...}& doesn't need to be harder to use than C++ struct{T...}*, but Rust keeps it difficult because the community views it as bad code design and wants to keep it hard. And *mut T lacks RAII unlike C++'s unique_ptr, and requires unsafe blocks in every dereference. As a result, people

I see Rust as a counterexample, serving as a formalization of provably safe patterns of manual memory management. I do wish it made it easier to write human-checked code the compiler cannot verify; unsafe code is so painful with unnecessary pitfalls, that many people write either wrong-but-ergonomic unsafe code (https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/, https://github.com/emu-rs/snes-apu) or add runtime overhead (Rc and RefCell).

To phrase what my sibling commentor said but in a different way: This paper is an experiment to see if a particular API could make using Rust easier. This specific API is not sound. This means that the paper's results are kind of irrelevant in a strict sense; this API cannot work in Rust, so it being easier is kind of a moot point. Maybe someone can take their API, make it sound, and then try again, and that's certainly good. But it is a serious flaw in the methodology. Specifically, this API call is unsound: GcRefCell<T>::as_mut(&self) -> &mut T It's not about the internals of the GC. It's about the API that it exposes to users. The author has some ideas: https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/issues/2#issuecomment-939... These ones are straightforward, and would probably work, but they would also introduce some friction, and removing fri

unfortunately, it's unsound https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/issues/2

> To see whether Bronze could make Rust more usable, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with volunteers from a 633-person class, collecting data from 428 students in total. Well, this paper starts off with a bang. A quick search on github returns this repo [1] by mcoblenz who I assume is the first author Michael Coblenz. Unfortunately nothing but the readme has been updated in 10 months and I couldn't find a link to the latest source with a skim of the paper and bibliography. [1] https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze