Posted by henrygarner 11 hours ago
Oh dear. I strongly suggest this author look specification up in a dictionary.
Nor did they make any mistakes when they described how they produced a specification, (and indeed, that it is a specification) despite your insinuation otherwise, for a similar reason.
Maybe instead of pointing towards dictionaries, stop pretending that you lack reading comprehension, and get off of your high horse please.
Rust specifically does not forbid deadlocks, including deadlocks caused by resource leaks. There are many ways in safe Rust to deliberately leak memory - either by creating reference count cycles, or the explicit .leak() methods on various memory-allocating structures in std. It's also not entirely useless to do this - if you want an &'static from heap memory, Box.leak() does exactly that.
Now, that being said, actually writing code to hold a LockGuard forever is difficult, but that's mainly because the Rust type system is incomplete in ways that primarily inconvenience programmers but don't compromise the safety or meaning of programs. The borrow checker runs separately from type checking, so there's no way to represent a type that both owns and holds a lock at the same time. Only stacks and async types, both generated by compiler magic, can own a LockGuard. You would have to spawn a thread and have it hold the lock and loop indefinitely[0].
[0] Panicking in the thread does not deadlock the lock. Rust's std locks are designed to mark themselves as poisoned if a LockGuard is unwound by a panic, and any attempt to lock them will yield an error instead of deadlocking. You can, of course, clear the poison condition in safe Rust if you are willing to recover from potentially inconsistent data half-written by a panicked thread. Most people just unwrap the lock error, though.
It seems the difference between this and conventional specification languages is that Allium's specs are in natural language, and enforcement is by LLM. This places it in a middle ground between unstructured plan files, and formal specification languages. I can see this as a low friction way to improve code quality.
What a horrible world we live in where the author of great writing like this has to sit and be accused of "being AI slop" simply because they use grammar and rhetoric well.
If an LLM wrote that, then I no longer oppose LLM art.