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Linus Torvalds' Initial Comment On Rust Code Prospects Within The Linux Kernel
Kernel developers appear to be eager to debate the merits of potentially allowing Rust code within the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds himself has made some initial remarks on the topic ahead of the Linux Plumbers 2020 conference where the matter will be discussed at length.
[...] Linus Torvalds chimed in though with his own opinion on the matter. Linus commented that he would like it to be effectively enabled by default to ensure there is widespread testing and not any isolated usage where developers then may do "crazy" things. He isn't calling for Rust to be a requirement for the kernel but rather if the Rust compiler is detected on the system, Kconfig would enable the Rust support and go ahead in building any hypothetical Rust kernel code in order to see it's properly built at least.
Linus Torvalds Wishes Intel's AVX-512 A Painful Death
According to a mailing list post spotted by Phoronix, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has shared his strong views on the AVX-512 instruction set. The discussion arose as a result of recent news that Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors reportedly lack support for AVX-512.
Torvalds' advice to Intel is to focus on things that matter instead of wasting resources on new instruction sets, like AVX-512, that he feels aren't beneficial outside the HPC market.
Related: Rust 1.0 Finally Released!
Results of Rust Survey 2016
AVX-512: A "Hidden Gem"?
Linus Torvalds Rejects "Beyond Stupid" Intel Security Patch From Amazon Web Services
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 14 2020, @01:57PM
Both C and C++ are the kind of languages that I am arguing against not for.
It is unfortunate that some good languages never take hold and get the recognition they deserve. I've seen talk about that for a long time and no good solution. Betting on a programming language for a big project is a huge bet. A gigantic risk. It is amusing that the only modern languages to gain any traction are mostly created by corporations. Java, Swift, Rust, C#, Go, Dart.
That can be true. I think back to languages like Pascal and Modula 3. It is important for small bits of code that might manipulate the hardware to turn off some features. In Pascal, I remember an example like:
* Declare a constant, named "memory" that is a pointer to a byte array, and initialized to zero.
Talk about instant PEEK / POKE. Anywhere you could do: memory^[16384] = 227;
That is just an example, where if you were writing code to manipulate the hardware of an IBM PC's video display, being able to say "I know what I'm doing" is quite useful and not hubris. Since it's a constant, it doesn't use up a global stack slot as a variable. Once it is initialized, it is "safe" to use anywhere. But you might limit its visibility to a specific "unit" (pascal term) where you are providing an abstraction over some hardware diddling.
I use Java every day too. So far as I am able to determine, I have not yet been involuntarily committed to any mental institution. (But even if so, I can't tell, because I wake up every day and program Java.)
Java has its warts. As do most languages. The things that it does well vastly outweigh the warts. Otherwise nobody would use it.
The success of Java is an economic argument. And this is what most programmers miss. Programmers think too much in purely technical terms without other considerations. Completely unable to see what drove Java to success. Or why it is so widely used. Especially by huge financial institutions, banks, or other corporate enterprise software. So much so that Microsoft needed to try to steal it.
The previous paragraph especially applies to garbage collection. People who hate GC don't understand the economic argument. But there are also technical arguments for it. I'm not saying GC should be used everywhere. But for higher level languages used to write applications, I'll let the evolution of languages speak for itself. How many modern high level languages have GC? Python. JavaScript. Go. Visual Basic. Visual FoxPro. Java. C#. Lisp and its variants. Haskell et all. Prolog style languages. Theorem provers. Computer Algebra System languages. I would add any language that runs on the JVM (Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, etc, etc)
While people argue about languages that manipulate bits and bytes and teeny bits of technical efficiency, and lack of high level abstractions, the high level language users can get things done, much more quickly, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Compilers CAN and DO catch certain types of errors 100%.
Compilers can NEVER catch certain types of errors, that is 0%.
A compiler is never going to know that a check should be subtracted, and a receipt should be added to a total. But a compiler can catch an error where you're trying to assign a String to an HtmlString or to an SqlString without going through an "escape" function, because those two string types are incompatible.
It is important and beneficial that languages and compilers now catch more types of errors than long ago. Entire classes of bugs have been eliminated by language design. I would just point out that GC eliminated three different types of memory bugs that are the scourge of all software that has ever been written in C or C++, and the source of many security problems.
You're preaching to the choir.
Languages need to be small. Comprehensible. Never put something into a language that could go into a "standard library". Follow the "scheme" philosophy more than the "common lisp" philosophy.
Compilers need to be FAST. At least for development. The speed of the Edit-Compile-Debug cycle is extremely important.
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