[SystemSafety] Safety and programming languages

Stefano Costa stefano.costa at bluewind.it
Wed Mar 16 12:12:14 CET 2022


Good point Derek. Which leads to a more general discussion about 
performance vs safety/quality. Sometimes obsession for performance is a 
false problem, while having runtime checking in place (not only for 
arrays) consumes resources but makes it possible to concentrate efforts 
in better organizing the application so that performance is no more an 
issue.

Difficult to understand in written words, but practically so much true 
based on my experience.



On 16/03/22 11:59, Derek M Jones wrote:
> Stefano,
> 
>> I'm looking forward at using ADA and Rust in real development, while 
>> up to now we only did PoC and Academic stuff. 
> 
> I have always been a fan of the the runtime checks performed
> by languages such as Ada (I do wish other languages would
> support subranges).
> 
> Runtime checks such as array bounds checking are also
> touted as a benefit by the Rust community.  For years
> array bounds checking has been supported by C compilers,
> but rarely used or talked about.
> 
> What advantages do you see with Rust, compared to C, when
> using compilers that do the runtime checking that Rust performs?
> The benefits appear to be small, but I am not a Rust expert.
> 
> My experience with runtime checks is that they get switched
> off in production code.  Reasons include performance and
> issues with handling a runtime error (many such errors
> don't change program behavior if left unchecked).
> 
> Do you plan to leave runtime checking on in your production
> code?
> 

-- 
Stefano Costa
M +39 335 6565749
http://www.bluewind.it


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