It's the same argument anti-vaxers love to make. "Well you can still get covid after getting the shot", which is something I read and heard quite a lot. That doesn't make the thing useless.
The older I get the more I realise that I have taken way to much of my mathematical intuition for granted.
This I'd an example of people not grasping simple probabilities. Forced to play Russian Roulette they prefer the revolver with 5 bullets in its chambers or the one with just a single bullet, because in both cases people die.
Other concepts many people do not grasp are feedback-loops and exponentials. And by not grasp I mean: You explain it to them, the nod along and when faced with the thing in slightly different clothes they will actively deny it'd existence.
There's a hidden equivocation there. "Handling" errors, as far as the language is concerned, mean you do something with them, but explicitly discarding them is most definitely a "something".
From a human perspective we can consider that not handling the error.
But the language has no mechanism for "knowing" that discarding the error is wrong. Discarding errors is a fully valid mechanism that we must be able to do in a program because it is sometimes correct. There really isn't even a sensible way to define a way to "force" a user to "handle" errors. The language can only be designed to make it hard to forget to "handle" them somehow in the way the language sees, but it is always possible for the user to incorrectly handle them, of which discarding them when they shouldn't have is only one particularly cognitively-available option but is hardly the full scope of possibilities. Probably isn't even the most common mistake to make, I would imagine there are far more errors that are not handled "correctly" than ones that are spuriously discarded.
Note I keep saying "language" rather than Rust. All a language can do is surface the issue, and Rust does that. It can't force good code. No language can.
Go does force you too, but it also supports _ as a bypass - because sometimes you do know better. Just not in this case.
Rust never promised it'll let programmers turn off their brain, that's what LLMs are for.
You could argue the bug happened exactly because hyper's poll_flush treats flushing some but not all data as a successful return, not an error case.
You could say the exact same thing about safety belts and airbags in cars after someone has died in a crash.
Why even bother with measures that prevent many problems if they won't prevent all of them, right?
This is the argument I like too.
It's the same argument anti-vaxers love to make. "Well you can still get covid after getting the shot", which is something I read and heard quite a lot. That doesn't make the thing useless.
Humans are really dumb.
The older I get the more I realise that I have taken way to much of my mathematical intuition for granted.
This I'd an example of people not grasping simple probabilities. Forced to play Russian Roulette they prefer the revolver with 5 bullets in its chambers or the one with just a single bullet, because in both cases people die.
Other concepts many people do not grasp are feedback-loops and exponentials. And by not grasp I mean: You explain it to them, the nod along and when faced with the thing in slightly different clothes they will actively deny it'd existence.
There's a hidden equivocation there. "Handling" errors, as far as the language is concerned, mean you do something with them, but explicitly discarding them is most definitely a "something".
From a human perspective we can consider that not handling the error.
But the language has no mechanism for "knowing" that discarding the error is wrong. Discarding errors is a fully valid mechanism that we must be able to do in a program because it is sometimes correct. There really isn't even a sensible way to define a way to "force" a user to "handle" errors. The language can only be designed to make it hard to forget to "handle" them somehow in the way the language sees, but it is always possible for the user to incorrectly handle them, of which discarding them when they shouldn't have is only one particularly cognitively-available option but is hardly the full scope of possibilities. Probably isn't even the most common mistake to make, I would imagine there are far more errors that are not handled "correctly" than ones that are spuriously discarded.
Note I keep saying "language" rather than Rust. All a language can do is surface the issue, and Rust does that. It can't force good code. No language can.