On 2020-05-07 14:48, Aisha Tammy wrote: >> I wouldn't want to read an OS written in Rust and I would love to see secure >> developments in C even if it hampers potential performance. Things like Go >> are >> not suitable for an OS with many small programs. >> > Curious about why... though admittedly I have never written or read rust in > great detail. > Genuinely curious why, I thought it was supposed to be pretty nice with > thread safety and > all that jazz. >
It was more the privilege separation part that I found made the comment show a lack of understanding. Privsep really has more to do with design than a language. Aside from the Go/Linux Kernel seteuid bug. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/1435 There have been many proposals for many years to reduce the care needed to write good C and performance or feature support like breaking some pointer use cases, always seems to win the argument upstream. A paper/plugin/extension is written and rarely makes the mainstream compilers, even as a flag. Admittedly, I don't have much Rust experience, either. Ada seems more applicable to avoiding dynamic memory on micro processors and I don't have the time to sacrifice, even on ADA with GCC support or on maintaining tooling and porting code bases. To me, Rust reads like C++ on steroids and I never liked C++ and so I lost all interest very quickly. I just have too many questions when reading it. I rarely like abstraction. Ada looks nicer to read to me but perhaps it wouldn't have that thread safety that you mention or the momentum Rust seems to have gained? Didn't Linus push back against C++ too? I guess I like Go and Ada because they are more similar to C and fairly simple in their core. I think Reyk tweeted about not liking Rust or it being a real pain and now seems to have tweeted about quite liking it. I am not closed minded but more skeptical of ever taking to it.
