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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@programming.devIs this a Nut?
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    4 months ago

    No, I’m saying that when people run into strange bugs, sometimes they put together an issue (like the person behind cve-rs), and sometimes they quietly work around it because they’re busy.

    Seeing as I don’t often trawl through issues on the language git, neither really involve notifying me specifically.

    My lack of an anecdote does not equate to anecdotal evidence of no issue, just that I haven’t met every rust developer.


  • Yes, the problems rust is solving are already solved under different constraints. This is not a spicy take.

    The world isn’t clamoring to turn a go app into rust specifically for the memory safety they both enjoy.

    Systems applications are still almost exclusively written in C & C++, and they absolutely do run into memory bugs. All the time. I work with C almost exclusively for my day job (with shell and rust interspersed), and while tried and tested C programs have far fewer memory bugs than when they were first made, that means the bugs you do find are by their nature more painful to diagnose. Eliminating a whole class of problems in-language is absolutely worth the hype.



  • The code used in cve-rs is not that complicated, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that somebody would use lifetimes like this if they had just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

    I’m as much a rust evangelist as the next guy, but part of having excellent guard rails is loudly pointing out subtle breakages that can cause hard to diagnose issues.





  • I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

    • your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the “will one day unknowingly modify” category.

    • use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.



  • hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

    I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

    I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

    I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.


  • It opens the door to more manufacturers since there is no ISA licence fees. While the AMD/Intel duopoly is being fairly competitive at the moment, it really doesn’t have to be. Only think back to how bad it was late 2000s to 2015.

    I imagine a plethora of core designers, soc vendors and platform creators filling their own niches; lowest cost, lowest power, HW accelerators, highest core count etc.

    I don’t see the raw performance of AMD/Intel being surpassed soon, just because of the sheer total R&D years each has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas better suited to a different architectural approach.






  • NT is not the majority of windows code though; for windows to be multi architecture, all of windows needs to work with the new architecture; NT, drivers & userspace.

    For Linux, if an existing userspace application doesn’t work in aarch64, somebody somewhere will build a port. For windows, so much of their stuff is proprietary that Microsoft are the only ones able to build that port.

    Not because “windows bad”, just a consequence of such a locked down system which doesn’t have anything open source to inherit.


  • Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don’t see it being used widely there for a while.

    In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a shitty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn’t require months of trawling through to fix issues.

    Now that I think about it, in 10 years I’ll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere…