Ambiguous title is ambiguous ಠ_ಠ
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
275 points (96.9% liked)
Linux
60275 readers
554 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Yep. Came here ready to rant
My heart stopped. Sheesh.
Yeah ambiguity is for C code /s
This title really bait me.
Yeah, thought that was going the other way for a second.
ditto and it made me sad; i was afraid that the maintainers had become too ossified to embrace change.
You scared me for a second
Phoronix commentors will be furious.
This means that drivers written in Rust will have just a good a chance to be accepted as drivers written in C?
I guess that still depends on the maintainer which is responsible. But since drivers often deal with untrusted data, which can lead to security exploits, this makes a lot of sense.
If i remeber correctly, the current approach is each device/vendor family is free to choose how they want to move. for example, gpu folks are actually interested to do rust stuff (for example novo, tyr by redhat,collabora). there may be some families who do not want to move fast.
I would have guessed that mixing different programming languages would cause problems. But apparently it's working well.
It's been 20 years since I did any serious programming, so I'm a bit rusty, is that what Rust is for?
No, Rust is to make you feel like you haven't programmed seriously in 20 years when you first pick it up, even though you are actively doing it.
Before the angry rust "mob" comes to get me: this is a joke. I tried Rust out of genuine curiosity, cobbled together a silly little thing, and quite liked it. The borrow checker made me feel like a total beginner again, in some aspects, and it was great to get that feeling again.
Ultimately it does not fit my needs, but there are a few features I am pretty envious of. I can totally see why it's getting such a following, and I hope it keeps growing.
Thanks, I might take a look at it just for fun. 😀
Enjoy! I don't know what you used to seriously program on but I am willing to be that the ownership paradigm that it enforces is going to feel at least moderately new to you, unless you forced yourself to code that way anyways.
Plus, as long as you're doing silly little home projects, the compiler errors are the absolute best I've ever seen. Literally just learn basic syntax, try it out, and when it does not compile, the compiler not only tells you why but also what it thinks you're trying to do and how to fix.
Absolute gem of a learning tool.
Enjoy! I don't know what you used to seriously program on but I am willing to bet that the ownership paradigm that it enforces is going to feel at least moderately new to you, unless you forced yourself to code that way anyways.
Thinking about ownership is the right way e.g. for C++ as well, so if one has coded professionally in larger systems, it should not be too alien.
One still needs to learn life time annotations. So, assuming that you know, for example, C++, it is an a bit larger hurdle than picking up Java or Go, but it is worth the time.
In many aspects, Rust is far more productive and also more beginner-friendly than C++:
- far better compiler error messages
- a superb and easy-to-use packaging system
- Unicode support
- support for unit testing right in the language
- strong support for a side-effect-free or "functional programming" style which is great for testing and tasks like data analysis or parsing
- better modularization
- avoids implementation inheritance, and the trait system is a bit different but superb
- no undefined behavior (in safe Rust) which means nothing less than that the code does what it says - and this is extremely useful in larger projects
- great support for safe concurrency
- the language and library frees one to think about interfaces and algorithms which is where the big wins for performance are hidden (and IMO one of the key factors for the astounding success of Python).
I could go on... but I need to do other stuff
Thanks for the detailed answer. Preaching to the choir.
The existence of the concept of ownership in languages like C++ is why I threw "moderately" in there. I agree depending on what you take that to mean, it may or may not do some heavy lifting.
For the rest, I'd divide it into hard facts (compiler messages are absolutely undeniable, in any circumstance) and things that can definitely be true depending on your personal use cases. I'm with you on this: for the vast vast majority of tasks commonly understood as software engineering, memory safety is a concern, and a lot, if not all, of your points, are valid.
I must humbly insist that it does not fit my needs, in the sense that memory safety is of no concern to me, and that the restrictions that a compiler-enforced approach imposes make me less productive, and, subjectively, also less enjoyable because causing more friction.
That being said, you may also not consider what I'm currently doing to be software engineering, and that's totally fine. Then we'd agree entirely.
EDIT: also, there are very few languages less productive and beginner-friendly than C++ in my opinion. The proverbial bar is in hell. But you are talking to an unreasonable C++ hater.
EDIT: also, there are very few languages less productive and beginner-friendly than C++ in my opinion.
I am a professional C++ developer with 20 years of experience and have worked in about eight other languages professionally, while learning and using a dozen more in hobby projects.
I agree with you here. The only areas where specifics are worse are package management in Python, and maintainability of large SIMULINK models.
That's the sort of indictment of C++ I like to hear. It's not just me then. I sometimes feel like I'm taking crazy pills with some colleagues who are super enthusiastic about it still.
But again, I'm stupid, I know I'm stupid, and C++ has way too many features and convoluted behaviours which are hard for me to remember and reason about. It often feels like it makes me think more about the language problems than the actual problem I'm supposed to work on. It may say more about me than the language, but I do feel validated with comments like this.
What’s wrong with implementation inheritance? Don’t you want that?
Generally no. As soon as a class hierarchy becomes moderately complex, implementation inheritance makes code very hard to maintain, because you need to read the whole stack of classes to see what a single change will actually do.
Rust has another system, traits and trait implementations.
The consensus seems to be that implementation inheritance leads to code that is difficult to understand and difficult to reuse. Its perhaps the main reason C++ is banned from the kernel.
I am willing to bet that the ownership paradigm that it enforces is going to feel at least moderately new to you
Absolutely, I am more used to program closer to the iron mostly C. My favorite was 68000 Assembly, python is nice, but I prefer compiled languages for efficiency. Although that efficiency isn't relevant for basic tasks anymore.
The compiler error messages sound extremely cool. 👍
Ah, a fellow C coder. Never did do assembly with chips older than x86_64 basically. The only old school stuff I touched was writing an interpreter for the CHIP-8. I tried writing some CHIP-8 too, but coming from more recent paradigms, it seemed quite unwieldy to me.
I like python for quick and dirty stuff, I don't like python for being interpreted and it being not obvious what happens under the hood, memory wise, at a glance.
Seeing as you do C I'll say this. The one thing I really did not enjoy, subjectively, with Rust, is that writing "C-style loops" comes with a performance penalty because there are bound checks happening, so the idiomatic version of a loop in Rust usually involves iterators and function composition.
I am stupid. C-loops are easy for me to understand. More sophisticated stuff is hard for my little brain. I'd rather be trusted with my memory access, and be reminded of my stupidity when comes the inevitable segfault. Keeps you humble.
The one thing I really did not enjoy, subjectively, with Rust, is that writing "C-style loops" comes with a performance penalty because there are bound checks happening, so the idiomatic version of a loop in Rust usually involves iterators and function composition.
IIRC you can speed up such checks by putting an assertion in front that checks for the largest index - this will make repeated checks for smaller indices unnecessary. Also, bound checks are often not even visible on modern CPUs because speculative execution, branch prediction, and out-of-order execution. The CPU just assumes that the checks will succeed, and works on the next step.
I had no idea about the assertion! Thanks.
Yes, this is plain wrong or often unimportant on modern architecture, you're right. I, certainly mistakenly, thought this was one of the reasons for the idiomatic version involving function composition, which is the thing I, subjectively, don't enjoy as much.
I stand corrected.
The function composition style comes from functional programming and Rust's OCaml heritage. It can make it easier to reason about invriants and possible sets of values of the result of a computation step.
Rust transforms these to the same or a close equivalent of hand-written loops.
Similar methods are used in specialized, high-performance C++ libraries such as blitz++ and Eigen. But if you mess up bounds, you will get UB with them.
it being not obvious what happens under the hood
To me it feels like it does things I didn't ask it to. So I'm not 100% in control 😋
the idiomatic version of a loop in Rust usually involves iterators and function composition.
What? You need to make a function to make a loop? That can't be right???
C-loops are easy for me to understand.
Absolutely, the way C loops work is perfect. I'm not so fond of the syntax, but at least it's logical in how it works.
What? You need to make a function to make a loop? That can't be right???
Ah no, there is a misunderstanding. You can write C-loops, of course, they just could involve more work under the hood because in order to enforce memory safety, there needs to be some form of bounds checking that does not happen in C. Caveat: I don't know whether that's always true, and what the subtleties are. Maybe I'm wrong about that even, but what is true is that what I am about to say, you will encounter in Rust codebases.
By function composition I meant in the mathematical sense. So, this example explains the gist of it. You may need to throw in a lambda function in there to actually do the job, yeah. I don't know what the compiler actually reduces that to though.
It's just the more functional approach that you can also see with Haskell for example. I find it harder to parse, but that may be lack of training rather than intrinsic difficult.
EDIT: pasted the wrong link to something totally irrelevant, fixed now
OK thanks for clarifying. 👍
If you don't like the functional syntax you can usually use for each loops to the same effect.
for element in array.iter() {
println!("{element}");
}
I like Python for quick and dirty stuff
There is one more little secret that not everyone knows:
You do not need lifetime annotations and full borrow checking if you do not care to press out the last drop of performance out of the CPU, or if you just draft experimental code.
In fact, you can very much program in a style that is similar to python:
- just pass function arguments as references, or make a copy (if you need to modify them)
- just return copies of values you want to return.
This makes your code less efficient, yes. But, it avoids to deal with the borrow checker before you really need it, because the copied values get an own life time. It will still be much faster than Python.
This approach would not work for heavily concurrent, multi-threaded code. But not everyone needs Rust for that. There are other quality-of-life factors which make Rust interesting to use.
... and of course it can't beat Python for ease of use. But it is in a good place between Python and C++. A bit more difficult than Java, yes. But when you need to call into such code from Python, it is far easier than Java.
Lots of "modern" languages don't interop terribly well with other languages, because they need a runtime environment to be executed.
So, if you want to call a Python function from Java, you need to start a Python runtime and somehow pass the arguments and the result back and forth (e.g. via CLI or network communication).
C, C++, Rust and a few other languages don't need a runtime environment, because they get compiled down to machine code directly.
As such, you can call functions written in them directly, from virtually any programming language. You just need to agree how the data is laid out in memory. Well, and the general agreement for that memory layout is the C ABI. Basically, C has stayed the same for long enough that everyone just uses its native memory layout for interoperability.
And yeah, the Rust designers weren't dumb, so they made sure that Rust can also use this C ABI pretty seamlessly. As such, you can call Rust-functions from C and C-functions from Rust, with just a bit of boilerplate in between.
This has also been battle-tested quite well already, as Mozilla used this to rewrite larger chunks of Firefox, where you have C++ using its C capabilities to talk to Rust and vice versa.
What have you been doing since you stopped programming?
Alternatively, why did you stop (seriously) programming?
It was never a major part of my job description, and I lost interest doing small hobby projects.
Understandable
Oh well, time to switch to TempleOS.
Or get a catgirl ears. And safer memory.
My memory is safe. Nobody ever knows what I'm going to forget..
Then catgirl ears are enough 😉
Pff you know how many layers of abstraction HolyC still has? Real computing enthusiasts write their OS in machine code. Not assembly, that's an abstraction too, literally tapping out high and low electrical pulses like you're in the Marconi room on the Titanic.
view more: next ›