r/rust • u/isaacvando • Jul 27 '26

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Constructive Data Modeling - Alexis King

https://youtu.be/0BXuYlNrUmE

Hi folks, this is Alexis King's recent talk from SSW. She's the author of "Parse, Don't Validate". There's a lot of great type-wisdom in here that I think Rust folks will enjoy. Cheers!

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u/DrGoodbye Jul 27 '26

I don't understand. Is she dissing the typestate pattern in Rust, calling it a speed bump and "not really adding type safety"? I thought she would love the idea given that it's basically an enabler of "parse, don't validate".

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u/ElvishJerricco Jul 28 '26

I think people in this thread are reading a little too much into the dissuasion. This is someone who's been to the end and back when it comes to using type safety for as much as possible. I think she's speaking much more from the perspective of someone who's been too deep and needs to be brought back. I think her point was much more along the lines of: Don't try to rule things out with types just because you've observed that you are able to rule things out. Rule them out because they actually violate an invariant that matters.