Most of my work was hard real-time, like motor control. When you have to compute new PWM updates for three motor phases 20,000 times a second, you can’t afford to have a garbage collector run and disrupt the PWM updates, not unless you want the MOSFETs to self-destruct explosively.
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I think some 1945 Nuremberg is strongly indicated as well…
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For me (a hobbyist) the hand holding (or holding my feet to the fire from the Rust compiler) seems to be helpful; so many edge cases and foot guns out there I don’t know about. Ever been to a bowling alley where they put the bumpers up to prevent kids from throwing gutter balls? I call Rust: C with bumpers.
Anyway, I’ve been looking to “parse” a poorly formed pdf file, and it is slowly sinking in how hopeless that is (and how misinformed I was about what a pdf file even is). computers are hard
It’s a little known fact, but PDF files are fully programmable. Someone even made a PDF file that can boot and run Linux (GitHub repo here):
Meme to keep it relevant for the thread:
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Don’t beat yourself up. On rare occasions I have to parse PDF files and from what I figured out, many – perhaps most – PDF file generators don’t “quite” follow the PDF specification, misread it, just have bugs, etc.
I can’t lay hands on it right now but there’s a hilarious narrative by a guy who tried to write his own PDF parser and basically the message is “abandon all hope, all foolish mortals who enter here”. It can be done, but it’s not a casual one person project.
Nevertheless there are pretty capable freeware PDF parsers (I use PdfPig). Saved myself a lot of headaches that way. The one complex report I parsed with it, I found that some report lines are stored in a different order than they were displayed, and I hoped that was “stable weirdness”.
Fortunately the provider of the file at the last minute figured out they could create an Excel version of the report, and while that was no fun either (wasn’t a nice orderly columnar report, but what I call a “report scrape”) at least there’s no uncertainty about what’s where.
As to Rust … I find garbage collected statically typed C# fine for everything I need to do, which doesn’t include games, hardware control or real time applications. YMMV. I guess Rust is also considered the ultimate in performance but in line-of-business apps and services, something like C# is performant enough on modern hardware. A lot more so than, e.g. Python.
We best take this to another thread if we’re going to talk more on this. I wonder if we should create a tech debate thread or something, lol.
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Created one here: Geek corner: tech discussions not suitable for other threads
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Funny, I thought it was an ICE recruiting poster…
lol it’s making fun of dating apps. 
