On 6/13/19 10:40 AM, David Mason via talk wrote:
My preface: 40 years of C programming is enough! I don’t plan to write any more C; where I need that low-level efficiency, I’ll use Rust. Ditto no C++; if I want objects, I’ll do it right with Smalltalk.

With that said, Hugh makes a legitimate point (if we were talking apples and apples).
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 1:12 AM (actually, earlier) D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
 |   Rust culture and practice doesn’t seem to like shared libraries.. I do.

Rust does tend to create static code from crates (its packaging system). But C does too, for source code that you compile into your code. The difference is that, because crates are understood by the compiler it is *much* easier to make decisions about what version you want in Rust.

Rust also *does* use dynamic libraries for C/system code. I have a web server that uses sqlite3 and the generated executable includes the sqlite3, resolve, and system dynamic libraries.

So the static part is the crates, and it is trivial to discard the previously frozen versions and compile with the latest versions.

HOWEVER, since Rust code is intrinsically much, much safer than C code, stability of API is much more legitimate a characterizer of the version that you want than bug-fixes (and bug-fixes are almost never security/safety related). Rust uses semantic versioning of crates, so you can specify, e.g. version 2.3.* of a crate, to get any bug-fixes without any breaking changes.

Your mixing issues here.

C defiantly has a number of shortcomings and features that can shoot you in the foot but that has nothing to do with shared libraries.

Shared libraries are not a "feature" of C and any programming environment can be designed to have shared runtime linkable modules.

The first reason to not have runtime linkable modules is because doing it right is complex and it has take the unix world decades to get the current reliable and stable environment working.

As for versioning most times versions are to keep track of bug fixes and no matter how safe and rigorous  a programming language is programmers are much smarter and find ways to introduce bugs into their code.

Having to recompile your programs whenever there is a version change to a sub sub sub module is a major pain in the ass and just imagine you had to rebuild your whole linux system any time there was a software change.

There are lots of reasons to not use runtime linkable libraries but none of those reasons is the perceived "safety" of the language.

All in all, I think Rust is making the right choice here. (And C is making the right choice for C code, too - because it’s so unsafe!)

../Dave


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