Afaik they’re hoping to land it on nightly in 2025H1.

Between that, work on the next-generation trait solver and promoting parallel frontend, there’s some stuff to look forward in the compiler this year.

Do also note that by saying that some % of crates use unsafe, it’s not implied that 100% of the code in that crate is marked unsafe. It could be as little as one line; it could be a whole lot; it could be well-documented and tested; it might not be. (This is part of what the talk is about.)

It’s also rather to be expected that there’s more unsafe in embedded. As Steve Klabnik gets into in How to Do Embedded Development with Rust (GOTO 2023), it’s used when you e.g. want to set a certain memory address to a certain value, which in a lot of contexts is nonsense, but in some contexts makes a LED light up.

Yeah, the article comes off as needing so much context that the article itself is sus. Like

Hejlsberg stated the obvious when saying that TS isn’t the fastest language. Although it can laughably run Doom at 0.0000009645 fps.

… which is referencing an implementation of Doom in the TS type system. It’s a funny idea, but an arbitrary reader who doesn’t know about that and doesn’t bother clicking through will get a very wrong impression.

The reimplementation (which they’ve done partially automated; Go apparently lets them do a very simple translation while Rust or C# would require more work to fit) should be a boon for TS devs, but not noticeable for those who just run stuff that happens to be written in TS.

Would be kinda interesting to see the effect if stuff targeted deno rather than node, though.

Leaking isn’t really the issue, though I suppose Rust helps with that as well. Its memory sales pitch is more about memory safety, which is not reading or writing the wrong parts of memory. Doing that can have all sorts of effects, where the best you can hope for is a crash, but it often results in arbitrary execution vulnerabilities. Memory _un_safety is pretty rare and most prominent in languages like C, C++ and Zig.

Rust also has more information contained in it, which means resulting programs can actually be faster than C, as the optimizer in the compiler is better informed.

Rust is already in the kernel and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being obstructed by C purists, who at this point are the people who should fork the kernel if they see anything but C as heresy.

One rather obvious reason is that society has a lot of greybeards in general. The baby boomer generation was named that for a reason, and people have been living longer on average. Lots of countries are struggling with the demographic effects. There’s no reason to expect that tech or something even more specific like FOSS would be exempt.

Another aspect here is that FOSS is still kind of new in society. There’s just more people who have had the chance to age into FOSS greybeards than when those greybeards were young. (And they were thus likely to a lesser degree blocked by entrenched greybeards when they were getting started.)

To be a bit more generic here, when you’re at government scale you’re generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.

E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we’d have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.

Thing is, there is already Rust in Linux, and Torvalds wants more, faster. He’s being sabotaged by C purists, who at this point should stop acting unprofessionally, or at the very least make their own “only C” fork if they disagree with his leadership so much.

This is the first I’ve heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.

Yeah, it’s essentially a weathervane or thermometer. You can indicate the state of a country by it.

At this point the US has joined the ranks of, well, grim theocracies. Not that the people at the top in the US worship anything but Mammon.

>What is C++? A miserable huge pile of "should"s

TIOBE literally ranks languages by search results. It’s at best a measure of SEO. It is, generally, a trash metric that shouldn’t be used for anything.

Reads more like if you made a mess as a kid and cleaned up before your parents came home. The state between when they leave and when they arrive is up for experimentation.

I’ve moved on from vim to neovim, and I think I’ll continue using something in that family in the future. It’s a pretty stable experience overall, but the inclusion of LSPs and tree-sitter have been good improvements too.

Ultimately editors are tools, similar to keyboards, os-es, screens, chairs, shoes and so on. There are some objective quality differences between a well-constructed tool and some slapdash nonsense, and there are a huge amount of subjective quality differences. What suits me may not suit you, and vice versa.

It’s generally good to try out some new (to you) stuff and see if you like it. If you do, great; if you don’t, well, now you know. I think my worst experience was with Acme (or Wily? can’t remember), during a phase where I experimented with Plan 9 stuff. Ultimately very not my cup of tea, but apparently Rob Pike (who made it) and some other gophers still enjoy it? Which is good for them, just like it’s good for me that I can choose not to use it. It’s just personal tastes, and I still think it’s good that I gave it a go.

The debate over holding down modifier keys vs modes is also a part of the Emacs vs vi debate from many decades ago. There might be some statistics for what works best for the most people now, but again, use what suits you. And try some new stuff when you get curious, it’s generally good for you.

How do you know a post was written by a systemd hater? Easy, they’ll spell it with a big D for some reason. It reminds me of how Norwegian rabid anti-cyclists are unable to spell “cyclist” for some reason.

Claiming you don’t want to restart an old debate and then trying to restart it anyway is pretty funny.

You might also want to keep in mind that you can’t really force an init system on Linux distros. Systemd became the norm through being preferred, as in, the people using and maintaining it think it’s good. At this point you might as well be ranting about how “LinuX is evil somehow” and we should all be using GNU HURD or Minix or something.

Also: Haven’t thought about suckless in well over a decade, maybe closer to two? I guess way back in the day I was kinda intrigued by their ideas and used some of their products; these days I’d rather see them as something between an art shop and people who are playing a somewhat unusual game with themselves, but not particularly relevant to mainstream software engineering.

Smells a bit Scandinavian to me. In Norwegian we also use “ur” that way, including “urspråk” (Ursprache, ur-language). We have a different word for origin (opphav), so ur remains a prefix that’s difficult for us to translate.

Going by Wikipedia however, the English translation for Norwegian urspråk and German Ursprache is proto-language.

I had to figure out how to do the factory reset at the gym after I got the blue triangle of death when leaving work. Oddly enough it synced the gym plan I wanted and leaving it connected to the phone didn’t seem to produce any other ill effects, but I stayed away from anything using GPS.

But yeah, the general advice for Garmins just now seems to be “just don’t” and hope it doesn’t triangle itself until the fix is out

Yeah, same. Post-metal or thereabouts towards jazz can work too IME. Stuff like Russian Circles, Earthless, Elephant9. But stuff like Waveshaper and Amynedd are often safer bets.

They’re stuck in a reboot loop, but not bricked. A factory reset works (but the problem may reappear on update).

Smartphones – and to a lesser degree, tablets – kind of are not a phenomenal programming platform.

[…]

But not everyone in 1990 had a personal computer, and I would venture to say that the group that did probably was not a representative sample of the population. I’d give decent odds that a lower proportion of the population as a whole could program in 1990 than today.

Yeah, and these things influence each other. Today we have a networked computer in our pockets, and depending on where you live, they may or may not be required or the standard way to do tasks like get a bus ticket, login to government websites so you can do your taxes and whatnot, transfer money, and a bunch of other tasks that to a degree are really sensitive.

So as we have a bunch of barely computer-literate people functionally dependent on these devices, we also need them to be locked down and secure. MS had some grand thoughts about “code everywhere”, which turns out is pretty awful security-wise, especially with gullible networked users. The users in this community have very different capabilities and needs than the users who might not even want a computer, but feel forced to get one because the government stopped using paper and bank and post offices no longer exist. (This is, essentially, what it’s like in modern Norway. We might be ending home delivery of snail mail soon; mail delivery every other weekday seems to be an unnecessary expense.) Beyond the lack of a keyboard, the platform has a bunch of constraints that don’t make for fun computing, but they absolutely need to be there. Unfortunately we also wind up with a split between the common restricted platforms, and the casual, customizable platforms, and not everybody gets to be exposed to the latter.

There are probably, in absolute numbers, a whole lot more people who know js or Python than people who knew BASIC in the 80s. In addition there are people who are pretty good at spreadsheet programming, and other tasks that are essentially coding, even if they’re not listed as regular programming languages.