The rust maintainers need to learn from the mistakes of the c++ design committee and understand that not adding a feature at all is in itself a desirable feature.
For example, your section on effects:
> Functions which guarantee they do not unwind (absence of the panic effect)
* I actually don’t see how this is any more beneficial than the existing no_panic macro https://docs.rs/no-panic/latest/no_panic/
> Functions which guarantee they terminate (absence of the div effect)
> Functions which are guaranteed to be deterministic (absence of the ndet effect)
> Functions which are guaranteed to not call host APIs (absence of the io effect)
The vast majority of rust programs don’t need such validation. And for those that do, the Ferrocene project is maintaining a downstream fork of the compiler where this kind of feature would be more appropriate.
I think rust is in a perfect spot right now. Covers 99.99% of use cases and adding more syntax/functionality for 0.001% of users is only going to make the language worse. The compiler itself provides a powerful api via build.rs and proc macros which let downstream maintainers build their desired customization.
The "caveats" section in its docs hints at it, but to be explicit: no_panic is a band-aid that can break when changing optimizer options or compiler/llvm version. It's not a good option for library crates, e.g.
That being said, I'm not at all happy with all the complexity and ecosystem fragmentation that async brought. I understand what you're saying. But surprise panics is a bit of a pain point for me.
There are ways to handle these effects without bloating up normal applications. For example, using attributes implemented as intrinsics, which wouldn't really affect anything that isn't using them.
The thing is, some of these things are very useful in specific domains, and all these domains are closely related to the ideas of safety. Nondeterminism and IO are important for purity/referential transparency, which is a fairly important effect for business logic IMO. Guaranteed termination matters for formal verification. Unwind removal matters for embedded. I don't think wishing for these things is really all that unwarranted
> I actually don’t see how this is any more beneficial than the existing no_panic macro
no_panic and similar macros are doing a very hacky workaround which isn't really a great static guarantee. The simple fact that building with panic = abort makes the macro useless is an annoyance in and of itself. dtolnay did great when figuring out some path forward but it's somewhat shaky
> I actually don’t see how this is any more beneficial than the existing no_panic macro
I think looking at the caveats listed in the no_panic docs should give you some ideas as to how a "proper" no_panic effect could improve on the macro.
Furthermore, a "proper" effect system should make working with effects nicer in general - for instance, right now writing functions that work independently of effects is not particularly ergonomic.
> The vast majority of rust programs don’t need such validation.
I think you also need to consider the niches which Rust wants to target. Rust is intended to be usable for very low-level/foundational/etc. niches where being able to track such effects is handy, if not outright required, so adding such support would be unblocking Rust for use in places the devs want it to be usable in.
> And for those that do, the Ferrocene project is maintaining a downstream fork of the compiler where this kind of feature would be more appropriate.
Given this bit from the Ferrocene website:
> Ferrocene is downstream from Rust
> It works with existing Rust infrastructure and the only changes made in the code were to cover testing requirements of ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and IEC 62304 qualification. All fixes are reported upstream for constant improvement.
I would suspect that such changes would be out of scope for the Ferrocene fork because that fork is more intended to be a qualified/certified Rust more than Rust + completely novel extensions.
> The compiler itself provides a powerful api via build.rs and proc macros which let downstream maintainers build their desired customization.
Given the complexity of the features listed this feels tantamount to asking each individual consumer to make their own fork which doesn't seem very likely to attract much interest. IIRC async even started off like that (i.e., using a macro), but that was painful enough and async thought to be useful enough to be promoted to a language feature.
I'm curious to what extent one can implement the described features using just build.rs/proc macros in the first place without effectively writing a new compiler.
You just know some guy will try to make cli code no-panic/deterministic use a bunch of crap and think he achieved something.
Just not allowing complex code is so much better than this.
Just even being able to look at a piece of code and trace what it is doing is 1000x more valuable than this. I regretted almost every time I allowed Traits/generics into a codebase