"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
Interesting proposal, but with severe risks: becoming dependent on a single specific compiler and rustc could include malicious code that isn’t obvious to an outside auditor. See https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html Ken Thompson demonstrated this.
Major shifts like this are complex, not so only from a technical perspective but even more because a lot of humans with different opinions are involved. But radical changes are sometimes needed to be innovative again.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] thread-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
Guess what 1980's language he is referring to.
Then in 1988,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
To get the first few points I expect to be raised on every thread that links to the proposal:
- it is a proposal by people who work on Python that would want to leverage Rust, not Rust people imposing on Python
- it is a proposal, doesn't mean it will get adopted, let the team discuss amongst themselves
- as called out in the proposal, official Rust platform support covers official Python platform support already
But what will the future of RustPython be? https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython/
Major shifts like this are complex, not so only from a technical perspective but even more because a lot of humans with different opinions are involved. But radical changes are sometimes needed to be innovative again.