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Comment Re: Aren't streetcars on rails? (Score 1) 132

Well play that scenario out - if you live in a city you'd call an ambulance. And you could still rent somewhere with a parking place and drive the kid. Worst case you'd flag down a taxi or other car. It's certainly NOT a reason that a city should be choked with vehicles just for your exceptional situation. And assuming you had an emergency do you want a city choked with traffic, or one which is free for emergency vehicles to reach your kid?

In summary it's not a credible concern and certainly not a good reason that an entire city should be one perpetual traffic jam because planners are so fucking useless they can't provide decent public transport or zone properly.

Comment Re: Aren't streetcars on rails? (Score 1) 132

Dublin introduce the "Luas" (tram) about 20 years ago. Some of it is dedicated track/lanes, with the inner bits sharing space with pedestrians/vehicles. There are occasional disruptions when idiots disobey traffic signals or some pedestrian steps out in front of a tram, but generally the service operates extremely well. The main complaint is that what's there is not sufficient and people want extensions going out to the airport, commuter towns & other public transport hubs.

Meanwhile Dublin is strongly deterring private motorists from using the city centre as a rat run from one side to the other with speed limits and traffic restrictions which incentivizes people to be using the M50 which is what they are meant to be doing. I wouldn't be surprised if congestion charges happen as well. I still remember the horrific jams in Dublin before any of this - I once drove from Cork to Dublin to catch a ferry and spent an hour stuck in St Stephen's Green and this was a normal day. St Stephens Green is now before it became a lovely pedestrian area. Less traffic is a good thing all round.

Comment Re: Aren't streetcars on rails? (Score 2) 132

It's strange how many European cities make it work successfully. Cars have little reason for going into a city, certainly not when good public transport exists. Vehicles cause traffic jams, accidents, air pollution, noise pollution and lower the quality of life for people who live there. Sensible cities plan accordingly.

Comment Re:Aren't streetcars on rails? (Score 1) 132

Light railway services have their own forms of delay - people falling off platforms, failed signals, power disruption etc. But I think the comparison between a guy running flat out and a train/tram that stops and starts collecting people is pretty stupid. I'm sure there are certain sections of the Circle Line in London where the same stunt could be achieved (running from station entrance to station entrance before the train below reaches the platform) but equally pointless.

Comment Re:It was always a harsh process, now it's too muc (Score 2) 197

It's even more humiliating every time ESTA changes. These days they merely want to know everything about visitors before they arrive - occupation, family history, social media, photograph etc. The poor bastards not eligible for ESTA probably have to show up at an embassy for a grilling. The reasons for this have transformed from merely homeland security into political vetting. A meme or comment someone might have made about Trump in the past could destroy a trip over. Not to mention people who've seen visas revoked or gotten themselves deported for exercising free speech in a country which no longer believes in or protects it.

Comment The more sensible option... (Score 1) 164

... would be to make all major highways & roads pay per mile with a basic standing charge and have a common unified system for collecting revenues. It would collect more money than tolls, put the burden of road maintenance on those who use it most and incentivize people to reduce car use. But that's too sensible and America didn't become grotesquely reliant on oil and tarmac by being sensible.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 271

The point, the obvious point is you don't call an "open()" and get an int. You use a RAII struct which protects your code. I linked to such an implementation. You are right that it can't enforce RAII on an int because it's a stupid assertion to begin with. And no it's not comparable to C++ and fstream because people aren't copying the terrible mistakes of C++ when implementing or using Rust.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 271

The only time I've *really* wished for inheritance in Rust was when I had to implement a type system which was basically a inherited tree. Can't extend B from A, so instead you have to composite A in B and expose all the functions that A has to be on B too. In the end I used Rust's macros to implement it and I'm not going to say it was pretty but it worked. It would be nice for there to be a way to do the composition without handrolling macros. For the most part, though you can just use traits, including default implementations which are similar to interfaces and do what you like.

It's certainly clear why Rust didn't want to copy C++ classes (and things like polymorphism) which are so broken in so many ways that they're a constant source of bugs and problems. Things like fragile base classes, multiple inheritance / diamonds, copy/move issues - rule of 3/5, default constructors, missing virtual destructors etc. etc. Most C++ code strongly avoids having more than one base class, but plenty will use pure virtual classes as interfaces. But everything is an afterthought stacked on other afterthoughts.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 271

This isn't correct. Let's say you make an unsafe low level call to an OS primitive from Rust, such as open() (yeah I I know this is windows not unix, but same principle applies). You'll get back an int. Rust won't enforce RAII file descriptor semantics on that int. It's memory safe, not telepathic. Actually it's very correct. If you utilise "unsafe" in your code, then you still get all the lifetime and borrow checks in Rust. If a struct implements RAII (e.g. by implementing Drop), then the compiler will release the thing whether it was used in unsafe or not.

Also, I may add that people usually aren't dealing with an int as a resource. If they need a file descriptor they'll use OwnedFd or similar from std which will automatically deal with the dropping. And yes that thing is RAII too and has a Drop trait which does all the unsafe stuff shielding the caller from needing to be unsafe itself.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 271

I don't see why it should fail. Machine translation could turn bits of C into functionally identical Rust. But whether that is useful is an open question. I would only see this exercise being beneficial is if they could leave the endpoints alone and refactor everything inside to be as clean and safe as possible.

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