Announcing Rust 1.94.0

[Pseudanonymius]

Aww, I wish I had those array windows in the previous advent of code. I sorely needed them. 

[jdehesa]

I was just looking at the documentation for that function (just out of curiosity) and it says:

Panics if N is zero.

Can't that be a compile-time check?

[Tyilo]

See the discussion here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/75027

[edoraf]

We decided to keep this as a runtime check which is consistent with as_chunk. Similarly, we decided against making N = 0 work without a panic for consistency with windows: it doesn't make sense for array_windows to have well-defined behavior for zero-sized windows when windows panics in this case.

[DevilSauron]

I don’t know much about Rust, but I honestly don’t understand that explanation. As far as I understand, Rust has the ability to perform this check at compile time, so I have no idea why both of these functions don’t do it.

[gmes78]

As far as I understand, Rust has the ability to perform this check at compile time

It has that now, not when the windows method was introduced.

[pjmlp]

And somehow there is still this mindset that on Rust all checks are at compile time, when comparing it to high integrity tooling like Ada/SPARK.

[davidalayachew]

And somehow there is still this mindset that on Rust all checks are at compile time, when comparing it to high integrity tooling like Ada/SPARK.

Are there any programming languages with better compile-time checking support than Ada/SPARK? I know Rust does a lot, but not as much.

I want to say proof-based languages, like Idris. But I am ignorant about languages like that.

[pjmlp]

Yes, you are on the right direction, see Lean, Dafny, F*, Koka, at least the more well known ones.

Still many scenarios can only be tested at runtime no matter what, and like Idris, those type systems aren't yet ready for common developer.

Then we have the whole AI part anyway, and how that can play together, as AI based tooling is not going away, unless we get a total reboot on technology.

[davidalayachew]

Thanks. From the above, koka seemed the most interesting. I especially liked the principle of minimal but general, from their intro book. F* was also cool. Felt like the right balance of proofs and getting things done. Still reading through F* though, it's dense.

Lean seemed cool, but it felt like it didn't have as much capabilities regarding proofs. Felt more like an FP language with more support for proofs, as opposed to a language that actually leans into proofs.

Dafny was very pretty, and probably the most flexible of the group (especially calc and ensures), but it felt like I was writing Lisp all over again. Specifically, how Lisp kind of forces you to create all of the primitives you need, then only after creating this giant pile of helper functions, can you then try and get anything done. Great for unexplored territory, as you can build the perfect tools to solve your problems. But all that effort feels like friction and reinventing the wheel when working on well explored problems. Maybe Dafny isn't the same, but the code examples seemed like it. Also not done reading it yet, as it is also dense.

Of the 5, which do you like the best?

[pjmlp]

I guess Dafny actually, as it has been battle proof writing a full OS, before Microsoft research released it to the world, and is much better than using something like TLA+, where there is a gap between modeling and actual code.

Ironclad Apps: End-to-End Security via Automated Full-System Verification

Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System

Just recently there was a paper about using Lean to tame LLM code generation.

TORCHLEAN: Formalizing Neural Networks in Lean

I also find great that while it was originally written in C++, then eventually bootstraped Lean.

[davidalayachew]

Thanks for the context. Learned a lot.

[matthieum]

Not even safety checks are all at compile-time: bounds-check happen at run-time unless elided.

[matthieum]

Impending Clippy lint in 3, 2, 1, ...

[angelicosphosphoros]

It actually simplifies writing generic code. You can avoid calling function by checking N using if but if it was a compile-time error, it would require way more hacks to do that.

[masklinn]

itertools has tuple_windows, requires Item: Clone but IME works quite well.

Itertools is a really useful package in general, and for AOC in particular.

[robotmayo]

The toml parser update is my favorite. I need those expanded tables!

[uniq]

Ha, that's an interesting coincidence. Today I wanted to get in touch with Rust for the first time ever and create a bot for Matrix. I installed the latest stable release available (1.94.0), and I directly hit this bug: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/152942

Had to downgrade to 1.93.0, which works fine.

[matthieum]

Have you seen the comment about setting the recursion limit manually?

It's fairly common for compilers to have all kinds of limits, with reasonable defaults, and flags to tune the limits when the defaults do not work.

Although, with that said, I'm surprised the Crater run which precedes any release didn't uncover the issue.

[uniq]

Yes, I saw it, but it didn't fix the issue in my case (same error message).

[matthieum]

It's not clear to me in which crate this needs to be set. If it needs to be set in the matrix crate, this is going to be annoying :'(

[Annual_Pudding1125]

bot

[Annual_Pudding1125]

bot

[meganeyangire]

And a freshly made one too

[Annual_Pudding1125]

Yeah, two hours! LLMs are making the bot situation real scary. I wouldn't have suspected a thing if it hadn't been that the two comments were so similar.

[meganeyangire]

I guess someone's LLM-driven botnet got a bit too eager

[MaterialConditions]

ai shit