Rust

As a Rust dev who has to target Windows, more support for Rust from MS is very relevant and important to me.

"Target Windows" presumably doesn't involve writing drivers. How would WDK FFI wrappers help you exactly in that context, and what non-trivial support is MS actually providing?

Maybe you mistook this community for !opensource@programming.dev?

No, I didn't. Any language community can easily become a corpo spam one if you don't put some rules in place to filter direct and indirect ads.

Let's analyze this "news" story as an example:

• Microsoft published trivial unsafe NDK FFI wrappers and tooling awhile ago (not new, not impressive, not news).
• Microsoft publishes an ad in their blog mentioning the published wrappers, and using a lot of marketing talk, with a random trivial LookasideList sample wrapper sandwiched in between. The real LookasideList implementation is of course neither available, nor is it implemented in Rust (If it was, you would be going through two layers of FFI to connect Rust to Rust, which would be even more stupid). Below that random sample code is this note:

Though we believe this wrapper to be sound for the purposes of the team that developed it, it requires further review and testing before we can publish it as the “official” wrapper for these APIs. Thus the above should be considered a possible look at what Rust abstractions for our kernel mode might look like, and not final code.

In the long term, as we make design decisions and finalize our wrappers, our intent is to publish these wrapper crates on crates.io as first-class members of the Rust ecosystem.

• Then independent "news" sites pick up on these low-in-technical-substance ads, and consume the well crafted marketing section titles like "The next steps: going from unsafe Rust to safe Rust". So we end up with the title here "Microsoft is turning Rust into a first-class language for developing secure Windows drivers". When in reality, almost literally nothing happened (yet). And even the premise and promise is all about making safer bindings to (presumably) non-Rust code we will never see.

For me, corpo ads with no "relevant" code is boring (or in this case, no new code at all, unless you count the sample list binding). And I can’t imagine I’m alone here.

For me, posting every single pull request from the Asterinas repo would be infinitely more interesting, and infinitely more relevant.