Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

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This makes strategic sense in multiple ways:

1. Rust's memory safety design will help Microsoft improve a gigantic portfolios of products that have been known to have lots of CVEs and 70% of them are memory safety issues, according to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's talk at RustCon last year.[1]

2. Windows 11's forceful push to retire millions of legacy PC hardware by putting Windows 10 EOL last October was absurd for millions of consumers and businesses. I was literrally helping a S&B having to replace the entire fleet of working PCs simply because Windows 10 of EOL and Windows 11 refused to run on those legacy hardware. Quite honestly those PCs ran just fine! That's why some has been migrated to Linux, in particular to Google's ChromeOS Flex.[2]

3. RAM shortage due to AI boom exhausted the memory chip manufacturers' production pipepline for at least the next 5 years. This means the mainstream PCs sold today will actually have a diminishing RAM size configurations than last year's in order for the PC manufacturers to not drastically raise the product price (or raise prices drastically for high RAM configurations like Apple does). This requires the Windows 11 operating system to be more conservative about RAM usage, Rust can be a part of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDtMuS7BExE

[2] https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/

I'm quite skeptical of rust usage leading to anything that helps consumers. Microsoft managed to add arbitrary code execution to Notepad. And it all points to a total disregard of the end-user, not lack of talent or capacity.

    > Microsoft managed to add arbitrary code execution to Notepad.

You write as though this was an intentional feature. Not, it was a CVE. I had to Google about it. For anyone else who didn't know about this CVE: "Microsoft added Markdown (.md) support and interactive hyperlink parsing to the modern Windows 11 version of Notepad. Improper validation of links meant that clicking a crafted hyperlink inside a Markdown file could cause Notepad to launch unverified protocol handlers without proper warnings." This CVE has already been patched.

    > And it all points to a total disregard of the end-user

I don't understand this part. Are you trying to say that because they had a security flaw in a new feature that this demonstrates "total disregard of the end-user"? It seems like quite a reach.

Arbitrary code execution in Notepad. That’s just insane, regardless of how they added as a “feature”.

At least 67% of your comment has nothing to do with this article.

Aight! Fable 5.1 summary says this is about Microsoft built, self-hosts, and runs in production a proprietary-backend codegen for rustc that bypasses LLVM on Windows. The vehicle is rustc_codegen_utc, an alternative rustc backend in the same family as the LLVM, GCC, and Cranelift backends, wired to the MSVC backend ("UTC").

    > This requires the Windows 11 operating system to be more conservative about RAM usage, Rust can be a part of that.

Most of Windows is written in C and C++. How would Rust help to reduce RAM usage?

Well that leaves up to almost 50% potentially not written in either language.

And little code can already have a big impact, e.g. react native in start menu coupled with edge running in the background

The best estimate that I could find says that Win11 is at least 85% C and C++. Where did you get your 50% value? Or do I misunderstand your comment?

How does Rust help with 2 at all? IIUC the main requirements were not memory or performance related but TPM and instruction set minimums.

> Windows 11 refused to run on those legacy hardware

What legacy hardware was this?

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