454882dcb7
This has been a long time coming. Conditions in rust were initially envisioned
as being a good alternative to error code return pattern. The idea is that all
errors are fatal-by-default, and you can opt-in to handling the error by
registering an error handler.
While sounding nice, conditions ended up having some unforseen shortcomings:
* Actually handling an error has some very awkward syntax:
let mut result = None;
let mut answer = None;
io::io_error::cond.trap(|e| { result = Some(e) }).inside(|| {
answer = Some(some_io_operation());
});
match result {
Some(err) => { /* hit an I/O error */ }
None => {
let answer = answer.unwrap();
/* deal with the result of I/O */
}
}
This pattern can certainly use functions like io::result, but at its core
actually handling conditions is fairly difficult
* The "zero value" of a function is often confusing. One of the main ideas
behind using conditions was to change the signature of I/O functions. Instead
of read_be_u32() returning a result, it returned a u32. Errors were notified
via a condition, and if you caught the condition you understood that the "zero
value" returned is actually a garbage value. These zero values are often
difficult to understand, however.
One case of this is the read_bytes() function. The function takes an integer
length of the amount of bytes to read, and returns an array of that size. The
array may actually be shorter, however, if an error occurred.
Another case is fs::stat(). The theoretical "zero value" is a blank stat
struct, but it's a little awkward to create and return a zero'd out stat
struct on a call to stat().
In general, the return value of functions that can raise error are much more
natural when using a Result as opposed to an always-usable zero-value.
* Conditions impose a necessary runtime requirement on *all* I/O. In theory I/O
is as simple as calling read() and write(), but using conditions imposed the
restriction that a rust local task was required if you wanted to catch errors
with I/O. While certainly an surmountable difficulty, this was always a bit of
a thorn in the side of conditions.
* Functions raising conditions are not always clear that they are raising
conditions. This suffers a similar problem to exceptions where you don't
actually know whether a function raises a condition or not. The documentation
likely explains, but if someone retroactively adds a condition to a function
there's nothing forcing upstream users to acknowledge a new point of task
failure.
* Libaries using I/O are not guaranteed to correctly raise on conditions when an
error occurs. In developing various I/O libraries, it's much easier to just
return `None` from a read rather than raising an error. The silent contract of
"don't raise on EOF" was a little difficult to understand and threw a wrench
into the answer of the question "when do I raise a condition?"
Many of these difficulties can be overcome through documentation, examples, and
general practice. In the end, all of these difficulties added together ended up
being too overwhelming and improving various aspects didn't end up helping that
much.
A result-based I/O error handling strategy also has shortcomings, but the
cognitive burden is much smaller. The tooling necessary to make this strategy as
usable as conditions were is much smaller than the tooling necessary for
conditions.
Perhaps conditions may manifest themselves as a future entity, but for now
we're going to remove them from the standard library.
Closes #9795
Closes #8968
|
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|---|---|---|
| man | ||
| mk | ||
| src | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .gitmodules | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| AUTHORS.txt | ||
| configure | ||
| CONTRIBUTING.md | ||
| COPYRIGHT | ||
| LICENSE-APACHE | ||
| LICENSE-MIT | ||
| Makefile.in | ||
| README.md | ||
| RELEASES.txt | ||
The Rust Programming Language
This is a compiler for Rust, including standard libraries, tools and documentation.
Quick Start
Windows
- Download and use the installer and MinGW.
- Read the tutorial.
- Enjoy!
Note: Windows users can read the detailed getting started notes on the wiki.
Linux / OS X
-
Make sure you have installed the dependencies:
g++4.4 orclang++3.xpython2.6 or later (but not 3.x)perl5.0 or later- GNU
make3.81 or later curl
-
Download and build Rust:
You can either download a tarball or build directly from the repo.
To build from the tarball do:
$ curl -O http://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-0.9.tar.gz $ tar -xzf rust-0.9.tar.gz $ cd rust-0.9Or to build from the repo do:
$ git clone https://github.com/mozilla/rust.git $ cd rustNow that you have Rust's source code, you can configure and build it:
$ ./configure $ make && make installNote: You may need to use
sudo make installif you do not normally have permission to modify the destination directory. The install locations can be adjusted by passing a--prefixargument toconfigure. Various other options are also supported, pass--helpfor more information on them.When complete,
make installwill place several programs into/usr/local/bin:rustc, the Rust compiler, andrustdoc, the API-documentation tool. system. -
Read the tutorial.
-
Enjoy!
Notes
Since the Rust compiler is written in Rust, it must be built by a precompiled "snapshot" version of itself (made in an earlier state of development). As such, source builds require a connection to the Internet, to fetch snapshots, and an OS that can execute the available snapshot binaries.
Snapshot binaries are currently built and tested on several platforms:
- Windows (7, 8, Server 2008 R2), x86 only
- Linux (2.6.18 or later, various distributions), x86 and x86-64
- OSX 10.7 (Lion) or greater, x86 and x86-64
You may find that other platforms work, but these are our officially supported build environments that are most likely to work.
Rust currently needs about 1.5 GiB of RAM to build without swapping; if it hits swap, it will take a very long time to build.
There is a lot more documentation in the wiki.
License
Rust is primarily distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0), with portions covered by various BSD-like licenses.
See LICENSE-APACHE, LICENSE-MIT, and COPYRIGHT for details.