Comment by akira2501
14 hours ago
I personally dislike rust, but I love kernels, and so I'll always check these projects out.
This is one of the nicer ones.
It looks pretty conservative in it's use of Rust's advanced features. The code looks pretty easy to read and follow. There's actually a decent amount of comments (for rust code).
Not bad!
Otherwise is a decent language but what makes it difficult is the borrow semantics and lifetimes. Lifetimes are more complicated to get your head around.
But then there's this Arc, Ref, Pinning and what not - how deep is that rabbit hole?
If you’re writing C and don’t track ownership of values, you’re in a world of hurt. Rust makes you do from day one what you could do in C but unless you have years of experience you think it isn’t necessary.
Okay, I think it is is more like Typescript. You hate it but one day you just write small JS program and convert it to Typescript to discover that static analysis alone had so many code paths revealed that would have resulted in uncaught errors and then you always feel very uncomfortable writing plain Javascript.
But what about tools like valgrind in context of C?
It was true until LLMs arrive. Feature compilers + IDEs can be integrated with LLMs to help programmers.
Rust was a great idea, before LLMs, but I don't see the motivation for Rust when LLMs can be the solution initial for C/C++ 'problems'.
2 replies →
Rust lifetime is just a label for a region of memory with various data, which is discarded at the end of its life time. When compiler enters a function, it creates a memory block to hold data of all variables in the function, and then discards this block at the exit from the function, so these variables are valid for life time of the function call only.
Context: I'm writing a novel kernel in Rust.
Lifetimes aren't bad, the learning curve is admittedly a bit high. Post-v1 rust significantly reduced the number of places you need them and a recent update allows you to elide them even more if memory serves.
Arc isn't any different than other languages, not sure what you're referring to by ref but a reference is just a pointer with added semantic guarantees, and Pin isn't necessary unless you're doing async (not a single Pin shows up in the kernel thus far and I can't imagine why I'd have one going forward).
I don’t entirely agree, you can get used to the borrow checker relatively quickly and you mostly stop thinking about it.
What tends to make Rust complex is advanced use of traits, generics, iterators, closures, wrapper types, async, error types… You start getting these massive semi-autogenerated nested types, the syntax sugar starts generating complex logic for you in the background that you cannot see but have to keep in mind.
It’s tempting to use the advanced type system to encode and enforce complex API semantics, using Rust almost like a formal verifier / theorem prover. But things can easily become overwhelming down that rabbit hole.
I always feel Arc is the admission that the borrow checker with different/overlapping lifetimes is too difficult, despite what many Rust developers - who liberally use Arc - claim.
It's not that the borrow checker is too difficult, it's that it's too limiting.
The _static_ borrow checker can only check what is _statically_ verifiable, which is but a subset of valid programs. There are few things more frustrating than doing something you know is correct, but that you cannot express in your language.
Rust code is usually well commented in my experience.
for the downvoters: it’s true, and it’s because of rustdoc and doctests. comments become publicly browsable documentation, and any code contained within is run as a part of the test suite.
think the downvotes are because of relevance. point was not using advanced rust features, not being documented
1 reply →
Instead of asking "what other languages and project (open/closed, big/small, web/mobile/desktop, game/consumerapp/bizapp) have you experience with as to come to this conclusion?" people down vote you.
So lemme ask: what other languages and project (open/closed, big/small, web/mobile/desktop, game/consumerapp/bizapp) have you experience with as to come to this conclusion?
I expect the downvotes to be there because it's talking positively about rust, which is blasphemy! /j
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