The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The cons [...]

The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the “experimental” tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust for Linux team.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 hours ago

    I am willing to bet that the ownership paradigm that it enforces is going to feel at least moderately new to you

    Absolutely, I am more used to program closer to the iron mostly C. My favorite was 68000 Assembly, python is nice, but I prefer compiled languages for efficiency. Although that efficiency isn’t relevant for basic tasks anymore.

    The compiler error messages sound extremely cool. 👍

    • TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 hours ago

      Ah, a fellow C coder. Never did do assembly with chips older than x86_64 basically. The only old school stuff I touched was writing an interpreter for the CHIP-8. I tried writing some CHIP-8 too, but coming from more recent paradigms, it seemed quite unwieldy to me.

      I like python for quick and dirty stuff, I don’t like python for being interpreted and it being not obvious what happens under the hood, memory wise, at a glance.

      Seeing as you do C I’ll say this. The one thing I really did not enjoy, subjectively, with Rust, is that writing “C-style loops” comes with a performance penalty because there are bound checks happening, so the idiomatic version of a loop in Rust usually involves iterators and function composition.

      I am stupid. C-loops are easy for me to understand. More sophisticated stuff is hard for my little brain. I’d rather be trusted with my memory access, and be reminded of my stupidity when comes the inevitable segfault. Keeps you humble.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 hours ago

        it being not obvious what happens under the hood

        To me it feels like it does things I didn’t ask it to. So I’m not 100% in control 😋

        the idiomatic version of a loop in Rust usually involves iterators and function composition.

        What? You need to make a function to make a loop? That can’t be right???

        C-loops are easy for me to understand.

        Absolutely, the way C loops work is perfect. I’m not so fond of the syntax, but at least it’s logical in how it works.

        • TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 hour ago

          What? You need to make a function to make a loop? That can’t be right???

          Ah no, there is a misunderstanding. You can write C-loops, of course, they just could involve more work under the hood because in order to enforce memory safety, there needs to be some form of bounds checking that does not happen in C. Caveat: I don’t know whether that’s always true, and what the subtleties are. Maybe I’m wrong about that even, but what is true is that what I am about to say, you will encounter in Rust codebases.

          By function composition I meant in the mathematical sense. So, this example explains the gist of it. You may need to throw in a lambda function in there to actually do the job, yeah. I don’t know what the compiler actually reduces that to though.

          It’s just the more functional approach that you can also see with Haskell for example. I find it harder to parse, but that may be lack of training rather than intrinsic difficult.

          EDIT: pasted the wrong link to something totally irrelevant, fixed now