pete_the_cat

Times Square is tiny though, in relation to the rest of Manhattan.

"Please help exonerate us! We totally had the right to shoot someone because they didn't pay $3.50!"

Or Google/Reddit/Meta.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

I'm not a software dev, but I'd imagine that the codebase could definitely be reduced once most things are converted to Rust. From what I've heard, the kernel is a huge mess of spaghetti code that most people don't want to touch, for the fear of going insane in the process 😂

I'm not a software dev (I'm a SysEng), and have never touched Rust (I've looked at the Rust source code and it scares me haha), but I know a fair amount of Go, and even the Go compiler is a pain in the ass occasionally. I've "mother fucked" it so many times.

I agree. C isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but if we don't start modernizing the kernel now we could end up with a future like the US government is in where all critical systems run on COBOL code and no one wants to touch it for the fear of breaking everything.

I'm not sure if it was in my above post or not, but the article said we should start modernizing the kernel now before someone does to Linux what Linux did to Unix.

Redox OS already exists and is functional (meaning it boots and has a GUI, but it's lacking in various aspects), from what I understand it's pretty much Linux/Unix rewritten entirely in Rust and looks pretty promising. In 5 or so years it could be a competitor with BSD and then overtake Linux once it has a proven track record.

Yeah it is a monumental task, but it's also the one with the least push back. I don't mean start from scratch, but convert the C code to Rust in a dev branch or something and release a Linux-Rust kernel image.

Almost all real-world software development is like this. That's what we do.

I'm aware, I've written my own software even though I'm a SysEng, all I'm saying is that it's not an easy process with a potential for disaster. Just look at CrowdStrike (not saying that they were attempting to switch languages but just the scale of the fuck up and the fallout that it caused), we don't want that to happen with Linux.

I'm not rejecting it, I'm just saying that it's very difficult to completely change the code of a critical piece of software. The long-term goal is for Rust to overtake C in the kernel (from what I understand, I'm a System Engineer, not a software dev. I know Go, not Rust) due it being memory-safe and about 30 years newer. Critical code gets left untouched (a lot of the time) because no one wants to be the one that breaks shit (and get bitched out by Linus 😂) so I'm sure there is tons of code from the early 90s that could be made better with a newer language like Rust, but it's not as mature as C right now so that's not going to happen for a while, if at all.

Ah, but I still agree with the C devs, it creates unnecessary headaches for them. Also, old habits die hard.

I view it as the same way ZFS is supported: Linus and Greg KH are like "you can maintain it, but we don't give a shit about it, and if what we do breaks ZFS support, well too bad."

Me and at least two more of my coworkers (we got laid off at the same time) weren't software devs, we're Linux Sys Admins/Engineers. No one is safe.

with layoffs low

🤣🤣🤣 Tell that to the million or so tech workers that have been laid off en massé the past year! My friend's friend was a Senior Software Developer at Oracle for years and just got laid off a few days ago. Disney laid me off last year and I'm still looking for a job.