this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Here's what I think. Both opinions are correct.
Rust is sufficiently different that you cannot expect C developers to learn rust to the level they have mastered C in order to be working at the kernel level. It's not going to happen.
I don't really know too much about rust. Maybe one day I'll actually mess around with it. But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn't even find where the code to do a thing was. It's just different enough to be problematic that way.
So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.
Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don't want to learn a new language in order to help isn't going to make many friends on that team.
That's why I often recommend D instead.
Has a much more C-style syntax, except much more refined from the years of hindsight. The catch? No corporate backing, didn't jump on the "immutable by default" trend when functional programming evangelists said
forloops are a bad practice and instead we should just write recursive functions as a workaround, memory safety is opt-in (although "safe by default" can be done by starting your files with@safe:), some of the lead devs are "naive centrists" who want to "give everyone a chance at coding even if they're bad people (nazis)", implementing new changes to the lang has slowed down significantly up until the departure of Adam D Ruppe and the drama surrounding it, etc.Last time I heard about that it was much more limited than Rust, for example it even disallowed taking references to local variables. Has something changed since then?
D has many memory safety features. For local variables, one should use pointers, otherwise
refdoes references that are guaranteed to be valid to their lifetime, and thus have said limitations.Should I take this to mean that pointers instead are not guaranteed to be valid, and thus are not memory safe?
Pointers are not guaranteed to be safe. DIP1000 was supposed to solve the issue of a pointer referencing to a now expired variable (see example below), but it's being replaced by something else instead.
So I guess they are forbidden in
@safemode?Do you know what is the replacement? I tried looking up DIP1000 but it only says "superceded" without mentioning by what.
This makes me wonder how ready D is for someone that wants to extensively use
@safethough.https://github.com/ZILtoid1991/newxml/tree/main
This XML parser of mine uses safe by default.
It also seems to require a GC though...