Post #1846725

2026-04-30 17:17 UTC

@jac @jonmsterling no, what I mean is, they also say they use nix (or nixos) "because it "just works" and everything is remarkably easy to configure and doesn't randomly break." and yet they spend more time than all of my other students configuring it or getting stuff to work.

Replies (1)

@jac@types.pl 2026-04-30 17:24

@liamoc Right so the analogue here is that people who write Rust spend more time worrying about memory safety and concurrency. And that's true. Having a GC would be easier than worrying about where things are allocated. But the other reason they spend more time thinking about it is that they want to think about allocating memory efficiently, and don't want to debug segfaults. And for them, Rust just works. Everything magically is memory-safe. But if you don't want to write systems code, there's a wrong takeaway which is that Rust is therefore worse than C++, and a right takeaway which is that you're not interested in solving those sorts of problems. But I think for your students, it goes back to my sentence that Nix sucks for one person. You get to solve everything yourself but not re-use the solutions. It also ultimately comes down to whether tools intend to support it. @jonmsterling

Open ##1846726