All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
Honestly I kinda wish the Rust devs would rather go and support a project like Redox OS and then maybe we can have less drama about all this.
Rust is the future for this sort of systems programming work, and by failing to see that and accommodate its use both Linus and Hellwig are sabotaging the long term viability of the kernel imo. New devs are keen to jump on rust because of how much it does better than C/++ and how much easier it is to make safe and secure systems with it, but shit like this just demotivates that crowd and thins the pool of people who are willing to contribute going forward. We need memory safety by default, the task of kernel stability is only going to get more complex and unsustainable without it. Stop holding onto tradition and purity for the sake of it
Rust is not the only systems language with “memory safety”. Some even have better type systems (linear types, refinement types, GADTs) & tools for proving code correct. What grinds my gears is this “C is has problems, therefore you must use Rust” flawed mentality.
I agree but in terms of the features, momentum, and community around rust I think it’s the most promising option for memory safe language. But you’re right that it’s not the only option, I should say that they should be more welcoming to mixed language development with memory safe languages in general
Rust has affine types and gets close to linear when you include #[must_use] (you can still let _ = foo but at least it won't be an accident, also, drop code isn't guaranteed to run and there's good reasons for that), refinement types there's a library for that. GADTs... I mean sure trait magic can get annoying and coming from Haskell you'd want to do more in the type system but in the end the idiomatic rust way to do many of those things is with macros. Which, unlike Haskell, Rust actually is really good at. Really good. Tack refinement types onto the language kind of good.
Proving tools, honestly, there's only one piece of actually proven software (SeL4) and the only language it's really written in is Coq. Which Rust will never, ever, compete with on its home turf.
Not sure why Haskell is being invoked—several languages have GADTs & macros.