I thought one of the goals of Java and similar was partial memory safety? If it didn’t have null it seems it would be most of the way there.
And don’t forget Basic. Yeah most variants had pointers and equivalents to null, but they are ‘advanced’ and not meant for general code. (Although that’s interpreted and you said compiled, often it could be ‘complied’ similarly to Java bytecode)
@davidgro@hunger Last basic variant I worked with was the basic of the commodore machines. It had no NULL. I have also seen vbscript a little, afaik also it had not.
In Java, null does not mean a real 0 value, I think it is more like a static const, more similar to the None type of the Python. Its name is only a helper for the C/C++ guys to better understand a stack trace.
Ah, yeah looks like address 0 is nothing special on C64. I was thinking more about things like Qbasic and especially Visual Basic where dereferencing address 0 expecting a string or object is easy enough to do.
@davidgro The way that #Rust guards memory is completely different to the way Java or Basic does. Rust is a fully compiled language suitable for systems programming, and the memory protection all happens at compile time; the runtime actually gains speed through the compilation process, rather than having the memory protection slow it down.
The real difference is that the Rust compiler actually reads into the code it is compiling, rather than just making a mechanical translation.
That’s true, it is a very different paradigm.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that nobody thought it possible before Rust, but I agree it’s much more effective and performant.
I thought one of the goals of Java and similar was partial memory safety? If it didn’t have null it seems it would be most of the way there.
And don’t forget Basic. Yeah most variants had pointers and equivalents to null, but they are ‘advanced’ and not meant for general code. (Although that’s interpreted and you said compiled, often it could be ‘complied’ similarly to Java bytecode)
Java and similar (i.e. c#) are memory safe and run on garbage collected runtime.
@davidgro @hunger Last basic variant I worked with was the basic of the commodore machines. It had no NULL. I have also seen vbscript a little, afaik also it had not.
In Java, null does not mean a real 0 value, I think it is more like a static const, more similar to the None type of the Python. Its name is only a helper for the C/C++ guys to better understand a stack trace.
Ah, yeah looks like address 0 is nothing special on C64. I was thinking more about things like Qbasic and especially Visual Basic where dereferencing address 0 expecting a string or object is easy enough to do.
@davidgro @hunger Learn the three languages you are talking about before talking about them. Ill-informed thoughts impress no one.
I can’t claim to have learned them well, but I have used Java and various Basics over the last 30+ years.
Which parts of my comment do you disagree with?
@davidgro The way that #Rust guards memory is completely different to the way Java or Basic does. Rust is a fully compiled language suitable for systems programming, and the memory protection all happens at compile time; the runtime actually gains speed through the compilation process, rather than having the memory protection slow it down.
The real difference is that the Rust compiler actually reads into the code it is compiling, rather than just making a mechanical translation.
That’s true, it is a very different paradigm.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that nobody thought it possible before Rust, but I agree it’s much more effective and performant.