anp

Not GP but as a 90s kid who didn’t learn programming until my 20s my impression is that script kiddies with cute hacks are a huge source of creativity. And maybe even playful tools, which I personally enjoy. Something about not focusing on deep programming or tech maybe makes it easier to just have fun and accomplish your goals.

I’ve definitely seen all of these problems in Rust programs but they certainly aren’t limited to Rust programs. I do think it would be nice if Rust libraries were a bit more misuse-resistant when it came to preserving a coherent terminal.

I also long for a more misuse-resistant terminal but that seems like a bigger problem.

Maybe not fair, but it’s pretty normal for people to assess paradigms based on their most popular implementations.

I’m currently at google (opinions not representative of my employer’s etc) and this is true for things that run in a data center but it’s a lot harder for things that need to be tested on physical hardware like parts of Android or CrOS.

Ha yeah tough crowd indeed.

That’s fair that you only really need one call and so trying for ubiquitous interception is probably overkill.

Anyways I am quite excited to have a use case to try it out!

FWIW I think the project is quite cool even if you “only” manage to roll out the subsecond integration into popular ecosystem runtimes.

Have you considered aiming at lower level dependencies that are even more ubiquitous? Like libc functions?

This doesn’t seem connected at all to your previous claim. You said that the default is an absence of subsidies?

To start, rules for deductions aren’t tax rebates. Rebates also aren’t necessarily subsidies unless they’re targeted.

Deciding whether labor is a capital or operating expense and deciding how to depreciate it if capital is also not a subsidy.

No but if a TV was in my house yesterday I’d bet that it’ll be there today.

And my point about there being no natural state of subsidies is more important.

To head off the likely questions, I downvoted this comment because it is a gross misrepresentation of section 174 and the changes made to it.

The default situation is whatever was yesterday. I’d be astonished to learn that even a single significant civilization functioned without subsidies or patronage of priorities held by a society’s leaders.

The root of this subthread makes it clear why the current provisions to force software expenses to be amortized are different than other kinds of R&D.

I’m definitely interested in seeing this kind of content in Rust, have you looked at Rayon’s implementation for work stealing yet? Can result in some very nice high-level code.

Same reason Facebook is still Facebook to me, probably.

> Fascinating area to work in!

I agree! Lots of fun stuff to do.

> What's the driving use case for Starnix?

The Starnix code is open source like the rest of Fuchsia and anyone is obviously free to read it and form their own opinions about where it's useful or where it's headed, but as a mere corporate employee I can't comment on direction/strategy :(.

> How complete in app support do you currently consider it compared to something like WSL1?

I'm only familiar with WSL1 as an occasional user so I can't really say for sure.

We run (and pass) a lot of tests compiled for Linux from the Linux Test Project, gVisor's compatibility test suite, and some other sources. There are still a lot of those tests that we don't yet pass :).

> What are your thoughts about why WSL2 went the opposite direction?

I don't know much about the history there. I've heard Nth-hand rumors that MS had a product strategy shift from Windows Phone Android compat (a relatively focused use case where edge cases might be acceptable) to trying to court developers (a broad use case where varying from their deployment environment might cause problems). I have no idea whether those rumors are accurate.

I've also heard that it was hard to make Linux programs perform well on top of NTFS, and that virtualized ext4 actually worked better for Linux workloads where fs performance mattered at all. Something something dirent cache for stat()? Some of this is discussed on the WSL1 vs WSL2 web page[0].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versio...

FWIW Fuchsia has a not-quite-a-microkernel and has been building a Linux binary compatibility layer: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/starnix?hl=en.

(disclaimer: I work on Fuchsia, on Starnix specifically)

EDIT: for extra HN karma and related to the topic of the posted email thread, Starnix (Fuchsia's Linux compat layer) is written in Rust. It does run on top of a kernel written in C++ but Zircon is much smaller than Linux.

I’ve often joked that rustup with a little buildscript copy/paste to use the cc crate could be the fastest way to set up a C++ toolchain and project on lots of systems, but I also haven’t received much enthusiasm on the topic from people involved more with upstream.

FWIW Rust also has null-terminated strings available under its std::ffi module. I’m not sure it would be feasible to migrate C++ to the approach of multiple string types now, and I’m not sure it would have been the right approach for C++11 given C++’s approach to interop, but it’s definitely possible to support interoperability with those legacy APIs without constraining a default string type to null-termination.

As a possibly interesting data point I also have no visual imagination, and I did a lot of mind-altering substances in a past era of my life. However the only interior mental imagery I ever saw was seemingly random and intense fractal patterns. Never could relate it to any conscious thought like imagining an apple. I also ~never experienced much in the way of eyes-open visual hallucinations, even on rather high doses of LSD. One exception to this was DMT but it was still just a “fractal tunnel”, similar to what I could see with my eyes closed on other chemicals.

It wasn’t until much later (after I stopped tripping) that I learned about aphantasia as a name for my daily experience and I’ve always assumed that it was why my experience on hallucinogens varied so much from more common descriptions. It’s interesting to hear that they might “unlock” the experience of imagination for others.

As a former Expo employee and someone who took a run at this space (moxie) before running out of steam, it’s really exciting to hear this is the approach you’re taking! I’ll be keeping an eye out :).

I hate that states do this, but yeah it’s called “surveillance” when legitimized by norms, statute, and precedent.

I’ve usually had this attitude in the past and for me it came from my background: I worked IT, help desk, PC repair, etc for years before I got into programming and none of those contexts allow customization. And then for a while I did infra work where I’d be ssh’d into a vanilla VM or container instance to debug a deployment issue. Even though I mostly work in my own bespoke environment now, I still try to stay fairly vanilla with my tools. It’s pretty nice to be able to reset my workstation every year to get a clean slate and know that it’ll only be a couple of hours of customization to get back to what I know.

I interviewed with them in 2018 and at least at the time (much much smaller company of course) everyone there was very focused on the tech being an enabler for the logistics people. Their claim at the time was that all of the projects they pitched as possible work were driven by feedback from the front line people. Maybe that wasn’t true then, or maybe it’s changed, or maybe it’s still true but it’s not enough?

The TIOBE index’s[0] methodology is definitely flawed but it currently lists Rust at 19 and Ada at 22. No mention of SPARK.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Not OP but have had some analogous thoughts. Compared to the state institutions and startups I worked at before, FAANG-scale comp and perks literally changed my life, having grown up rather poor. I can afford to save for retirement while also attending to my health, I can afford a personal trainer to help me stay on track in my goals, I can afford a cleaner to keep my personal space tidy when I struggled for years to do so on my own, I have multiple food options every day which are healthy and “free”, I can afford bodywork when joint pain gets too much, I can attend arts and music events without considering the cost, and I can send money to family and friends when they’re struggling (among many other benefits!). I also splurge on a lot of dumb stuff but even reducing that spending I’d struggle to maintain the “important” parts of my current standard of living at a non-megacorp.

That said, I view money now as a way to buy my own disability accommodations. Not everyone has that need.

No, still crappy to use.

Ha! Learn something new every day.

I hadn’t been following their plumbing saga but seems pretty rough. EDIT: I had pasted a link but it seems that the author redirects HN traffic to something other than the intended content. The one I linked was the most recent post on DNA Lounge’s blog when I wrote this comment.

(disclaimer: I work on Fuchsia, not speaking on behalf of my employer, feel free to clone the source repo and make your own analysis)

FWIW, to the best of my memory as of a year ago I counted ~1.1 MLoC of Rust code in our open source tree, with an additional ~1.3 MLoC in things we've vendored from crates.io.

There was a bit more C++ when I did the analysis, but it was the same order of magnitude.

This was basically the approach of Mozilla Research AIUI, which gave us Rust.

IIRC this talk goes into a lot of history there: https://youtu.be/9OHcJzJQ2Nk.