This isn’t Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn’t quite fully working yet.
Has anyone used this before? What was your experience with it?
Note: If this is inappropriate since this isn’t technically Linux, mods please take down.
I don’t understand the obsession with rust.
From my personal experience I can tell you 2 reasons. The first is that this is the first general purpose language that can be used for all projects. You can use it on the web browser with web assembly, it is good for backend and it also is low level enough to use it for OS development and embedded. Other languages are good only for some thing and really bad for others. The second reason is that it is designed around catching errors at compile time. The error handling and strict typing forces the developer to handle errors. I have to spend more time creating the program but considerably less time finding and fixing bugs.
I feel like C++ is as competent as Rust for any project and it’s definitely older.
Not sure I can think of anything I’d enjoy less than trying to build a web app in cpp
It’s a system programming language that isn’t C or C++.
Edit to add: How did Go get on that page? That’s a stretch.
But what is wrong with C and C++ apart from the ISO fuck-up (ahem, slow updates)? There’s a lot of technical debt, so wouldn’t it be better to create an alt-language compiler that adds improvement over C, so that migration is possible in multiple stages?
Something like:
- Fix shitty imports
- Improve syntax rule
- Improve memory management
- Other new misc features
Rust isn’t just a new improved version of C or C++. It’s completely new and it feels completely different to use Rust. In a positive way
(notice: I am not a Rust or C/C++ expert)
Doing all that is creating a completely separate programming language from C. Rust is that programming language.
Fix shitty imports
Rust does that with modules and crates.
Improve syntax rule
You mean having consistent/universal style guidelines? Rust pretty much has that with rustfmt.
Improve memory management
Safe Rust is memory safe (using things like the borrow checker), and Unsafe Rust is (usually?) separated using the
unsafekeyword.Although Unsafe Rust seems to be quite a mess, idk haven’t tried it
Other new misc features
Rust has macros, iterators, lambdas, etc. C doesn’t have those. C++ probably has those but in a really weird C++ way.
I should have framed my words better, I guess. Rust is a radically different language, and honestly, none of the feature it offers fixes the main issue, that is technical debt - I mean yes, there’s incline C or FFI, but that’s still going to be a radical migration.
What I’m trying to propose is an alternative project, independent from the ISO. Maybe it could be a C-to-Rust, or a C-to-Vale migration project. It could be any of the modern language, I don’t really care. But that particular compiler/transpiler/migrationpiler/<something>-piler should have the ability to do step-by-step migration.
I’d say no. Programming safely requires non-trivial transformation in code and a radical change in style, which afaik cannot be easily done automated.
Do you think that there’s any chance to convert from this to this? It requires understanding of the algorithm and a thorough rewrite. Automated tools can only generate the former one because it must not change C’s crooked semantics.
