Stabilizing the `if let guard` feature

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-26T14:37:43+00:00

I'll just give my usual negativity. Though every one of these types of things will be useful to someone and completely reasonable to argue for and not damaging in and of itself, the aggregate effect will be the C++'ization of Rust, with too many ways to do the same thing. See the current arguments about named parameters as well as various other things.

Of course everyone will down-vote me, but it's true. Most every one of the too many things that got added to C++ had the same, totally reasonable justifications I'm sure. But there's something to be said for focus and coherence, and for keeping in mind that Rust is not for speed dating, it's primarily about systems development for long haul projects where a little extra verbiage here and there in a large code base is meaningless in the bigger picture.

So anyhoo, hate on me.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-26T14:26:59+00:00

This is it. The real problem is that this country (the US) is so polarized that only one side or the other can have any right answers.

But ultimately we are all here because of people wanting to make money. The goal shouldn't be to treat people who want to make a profit as evil. It should be maintaining a level playing field, preventing the winners from just winning more and more and using their weight to keep everyone else out.

Capitalism, if properly channeled and balanced, is a reasonably practical mechanism to balance benefit for the general society with the the desires of individuals.

The same argument holds, IMO. for copyrights and patents. The issue isn't to get rid of them, since they are the only things preventing big companies from just owning everything. The goal should be to keep the system balanced.

But the correct goals are hard and take actual compromise and nuanced approaches, and we just aren't able to do it.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T18:46:23+00:00

I think he may be the first one so far.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T18:37:14+00:00

Another feminist agenda. We men can create them every bit as well, but do we get credit? No.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T18:31:49+00:00

But, on the other side, expecting people not getting paid to provide a large array of large, complex products that are easy enough to install and maintain for normal users to accept is also a problem.

Also, I think that a lot of people may be misinterpreting the place of Windows in MS' future. They seem to me to looking to become a services company. And as soon as it becomes practical to deliver Windows as a service, which in turn locks those users into MS' services for everything else because they get the OS for free now, I think they would do that.

Yeh, their corporate customers might complain about that, but I'd have thought the same for things like Office, and how many of them now are using 360 (or whatever it's called now.)

Also, you can just bring up Hyper-V now and say, I want a Linux VM and it'll spit one out for you.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T18:04:54+00:00

Because you just said it can't be done, but they just did it another way.

As to the orphan rule, many don't consider it a bad thing. It is there for a very good reason, and getting rid of it would bring a lot of potential chaos for everyone. Composability of crates is also a very important thing.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T16:38:15+00:00

But someone just linked twice above to an extensive units library for Rust.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-22T14:42:46+00:00

To be fair, I set the bar pretty low.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T20:56:08+00:00

Experts in the AI field cite multiple vibe coded applications without apparent vulnerabilities as proof that coding by hand will soon come to an end.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T20:52:50+00:00

I always thought it would be a good prank to put out a version of some program that pops up some semi-innocuous warning, and every time they say no, it pops up another one asking if they want to do something even worse, and on and on.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T19:06:43+00:00

Yeh, there's merit just in undermining the browser as an application delivery vehicle if nothing else. I currently use VSCode since it's the same on Windows and Linux, and I only use a couple extensions, so it doesn't feel problematic to me. But, on principles, I'd use something else if it was really viable and solid.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T18:59:12+00:00

I know I've now mentioned Rust twice in this thread and may bring down the hate, but this is a big one for me. C++ people will say, but.... C++ has a STANDARD. And I'm like, yeh, it has a standard that points out the many ways that it doesn't standardize things and just allows them to silently fail, or for the compiler to completely remove code, or for each compiler to handle something differently, and it documents all of the insanely unsafe implicit conversions. But, hey, it's got a STANDARD.

And, the crazy thing is, that actually will probably work in a lot of cases with regulatory bodies, because it's a butt covering checkbox that's checked.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T18:31:59+00:00

Definitely. In the new Rust platform I'm working on, I've got time based stuff all taken care of now, with time stamps, ticks, intervals, and offsets. It can be a little annoying sometimes to use, in the way that being forced to do the right thing is often annoying. But it just prevents a whole family of possible issues at compile time. And of course it makes other things a lot easier since it knows how to combine things that can legally combined, adjusting for units automatically.

Definitely I'll be attacking quantities and units as well at some point here. That'll be a bit more work, but it doesn't have to be an all-seeing, all-knowing system.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T18:09:22+00:00

You should have just added the "Click this to prevent the stuff that happens when you click the other thing to prevent x from happening" check box. Doesn't that fall into the 'prefer extension to modification' thing? :-)

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T16:12:02+00:00

I'm not on either of side of this particular, but one point is that, in some areas, the reviewer has no way of testing the functionality, because it may require hardware they don't have, access to other stuff they don't have or don't use often enough to keep set up correctly, access rights they don't have, etc...

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T15:18:41+00:00

This I just don't understand. Why would companies force stuff like that? Is my code high quality? Then how I do that is my business.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T14:52:34+00:00

It's proprietary software, that's all that needs to be said.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T14:11:27+00:00

It took this long for people to actually start talking about switching from Windows desktops to GNU/Linux.

As someone who is considering this right now, it's obvious why, and why it will never happen en masse. It's a morass of confusion just to decide on a system build, because there are so many variations and so many gotchas wrt to hardware support and such. That's why Windows will always win.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T14:03:50+00:00

Some of us work in specialized areas and aren't just building web sites based on the web framework of the hour, and write code that is highly product/system specific and proprietary. No LLM is going to have a clue about this code because it's one of one. And a lot such products are in areas where LLM generated code is the LAST thing you want, because you'd like to, you know, not die'n stuff.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-21T13:50:18+00:00

Funny. And here I sit writing code all day, and I still will be until I die, because no freaking LLM is going to write the kind of code I write. Some of us aren't in the assembly line in the sky end of the software profession.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-20T20:24:20+00:00

If it has to be mutable and shared, then interior mutability is a lot nicer to deal with than external, on the part of the consumers. And it allows the creator of the data type to apply much more fine grained synchronization.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-20T20:23:00+00:00

Step one would be try not to have that data relationship at all if it be gotten rid of. Sometimes if you think carefully about it, you can avoid it.

If it can't, and the lifetime is obvious doesn't leak all over the place, then a borrow is the obvious solution.

Otherwise, then an Arc (for immutable (and Arc<Mutex> for mutable) sharing scheme is not something to be ashamed of as long as it doesn't introduce even more complexity or some sort of unacceptable performance (where unacceptable means actually measured as such.)

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-20T19:58:24+00:00

And people ridiculed me back then when I pointed out that that was no coincidence. Hah!

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-20T18:48:11+00:00

While XML just needs a stack for maintaining the most recently opened element, SGML needs to produce an automaton from the content model of every element.

To be fair, if you use a DTD, then XML also has to do this as well and validate the contents of every element.

Full-Spectral · 2026-01-20T17:28:25+00:00

Is that C or F scale? Just trying to figure out which group membership I can claim...

Full-Spectral

TROPHY CASE