Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library ("crate") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to.
Of course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as "writeable", "create if didn't exist".
It didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response:
---
Re: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better.
We should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE.
---
Of course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!!
Rusty Russell
npub179…elz4s
2025-12-15 05:19:47 UTC
Author Public Key
npub179e9tp4yqtqx4myp35283fz64gxuzmr6n3yxnktux5pnd5t03eps0elz4sPublished at
2025-12-15 05:19:47 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library (\"crate\") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to. \n\nOf course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as \"writeable\", \"create if didn't exist\".\n\nIt didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response: \n\n---\n\nRe: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better.\n\nWe should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE.\n\n---\n\nOf course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!! ",
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