minkles

I think the nature of the problem is the other way around. This is not harming the long-term viability of Linux. It is harming the long-term viability of Rust. As a systems programming language, the promise of which was using it to write secure kernel and system code, not being accepted into a mainstream OS kernel on either technical or political merit is a death sentence.

Both perspectives need to be tested against each other, carefully.

Yes a veritable ouroboros of suffering. I thank you for your service.

That sounds feasible. I just wrote my first Rust program (search for Ruststrike in this thread) and wow it's stupid verbose and not particularly safe if put in my hands. I can see while there is determinism and fewer footguns, it painful on a C++ level to write.

I think just having less in the kernel and moving bits out (like Mach) into isolated domains is probably better than reinventing the universe for some purity argument.

I was considering writing a microkernel OS in Zig that transpiles to Rust and targets WebAssembly on a RISC-V CPU. That would be ultimate security. No one would be able to peel off all the layers!

And unfucking things that the infosec people do keeps mine going up :)

Nah they will be scratching their butts like GNU Herd programmers are. Momentum is a bitch. It's why Windows still exists.

Close. What about Ruststrike?

Edit: I don't even know Rust but I wrote a prototype:

    fn main() {
        const LOL: *mut u64 = 1 as *mut u64;
        unsafe {
            std::ptr::write(LOL, 0);
        }
    }

Edit 2: fuck that's ugly.

You can still write security software that fucks up the kernel in Rust!

Edit: just in case anyone took this too seriously, it was facetious.

Gonna write my own kernel, with Rust, blackjack and hookers!

That's how this ends.

And I'm fine with that. May the best solution win.

So basically you're not doing all the coding on the iPad.

I never turned off SELinux. There are a few of us out there!

Heh it still hangs for 30 seconds every time I open a spreadsheet on windows when my printer is turned off. Has been doing that for at least 15 years.

I avoid office type packages now when I can.

It never meant anything outside Google or huge orgs. Everyone else is running cargo cults.

It depends what your risk profile is. There are no absolutes.

Numerous minor updates have screwed up things for me, particularly with some applications I rely on. I will usually lag 2-3 patches behind and wait for other people to suffer first and confirm what I use is stable. I am still on Sonoma / 14.5 at the moment.

Incidentally I actually have a Mac Pro here which is running Monterey which hasn't been patched for about 9 months. The universe has not and will not be imploding any time soon.

Everyone forgets the "availability" bit of security.

I think every Dell Precision 5550 in our company died from thermal issues within a year. All cooked. At least yours was trying to stay cool!

I have no idea how this is still as fucked as it is. Nothing in this space has worked properly ever.

Moved to Apple Silicon in 2021 after my Dell Precision cooked itself (and my lunch!) to death in my bag on a train. No issues since.

If someone does a convert this headline to a mathematical proof tool I'll die happy.

That’s quite a bit of effort gone into a plausible looking fake. As always buy from a reputable seller. There are few real bargains out there.

It’s usually less interesting on the EE side where you’ll get something that looks like an expensive opamp but turns out to be an LM358. It might even partially work in circuit!

The social problems, mental health and physical health issues related to cocaine, legal or not, far outweigh the benefits of legalising it.

I'll add that my cousin was stabbed 6 times by a coke head flat mate who had a psychotic episode.

And I haven't started on the slavery side of the production side of the supply chain.

Yeah which my poor friend had to watch them snorting off his toilet seat.

Yeah normal here in the UK as well. I was at a party last year and someone just ordered coke off WhatsApp. This turned into a mess because they wanted to pay the "menu price" as advertised and two guys with a shooter turned up and took £500 off them instead of £200.

So we have extortion, illegal drug dealing and illegal guns in one fine evening.

ChatControl is not the solution however. Reporting it to the police didn't do a damn thing either though so I don't know!

Conversely all 4 of the bugs I reported with that were fixed in the next minor release!

That is basically R with tidyverse.

  flights |>
    filter(
      carrier == "UA",
      dest %in% c("IAH", "HOU"),
      sched_dep_time > 0900,
      sched_arr_time < 2000
      ) |>
    group_by(flight) |>
    summarize(
      delay = mean(arr_delay, na.rm = TRUE),
      cancelled = sum(is.na(arr_delay)),
      n = n()
      ) |>
    filter(n > 10)

If you haven't used R, it has some serious data manipulation legs built into it.

I'd like to chip in with another perspective here. I don't think we can. The reason people use terms like Rust activist is because some of the user community is quite frankly unhinged. On numerous occasions across various sites, a helpful Rust user will pop up with an out of context and unwanted discussion fork into rewriting everything in Rust or misapplying it to a problem which is unrelated. When reminded thanks but no thanks this is usually responded to with either "you're one of the ones that doesn't get it" or something much more vicious. I had one on here yesterday. I had on in person at work last week.

This is a real problem because any zealot of this level serves only to discredit the product by association.

I have no opinion on Rust other than I don't have the time to learn it at the moment and it doesn't look like it solves any problems in the domain of things I care about at the moment. I have no opinion past that. I am interested in technical discussion on it in case it overlaps a problem domain I am interested in, which is why I am on this thread :)

Well not at that scale, but it isn't uncommon just to malloc/HeapAlloc a whole pile of RAM up front, spew your data structures into it and free it when it crashes / exits. It is a perfectly valid strategy.

In fact I did this a couple of years back on a project I was working on maintaining in win32. It had a complicated memory management scheme for a GUI process that kept screwing up. Turned out it couldn't ever use more than 2MB of RAM so I just allocated 10MB up front at the start of the process and wrote a simple incrementing pointing counter in that allocated block and free'd it at the end like a short life pool. Solved all the issues. Machines it's running on all have at least 16GB of RAM so it's not exactly breaking the bank!

Most of iCloud's services use CRDTs underneath I believe. That includes Notes, Reminders and possibly Photos as well. FoundationDB is some of the backend as well. I was told this by a drunken former Apple SRE in a bar :)

I think you should look into a mirror and think hard.

Yeah that. Just because you have a rusty hammer doesn't mean it is the right solution for the problem.

Oh wow so you write fancy crud apps on the web? I've already got 300 people who can do that in C# (.net core) already. Why do I need any Rust people?

What I need is people who can write very complex rule and constraint engines, mathematicians and statisticians to deliver some business value, not crud monkeys.

There are a very tiny minority of people who can choose the right technology for the job.

Rust is not the answer for most problems. If you like it or not!