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.
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(Score: 2, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 13 2020, @10:50PM (9 children)
Veto.
If you can't write a single line of code without needing to check that you're not fucking it up, I don't want to work with you. Not ever. I write the entirety of whatever project or feature I'm working on in one go unless it goes over a couple thousand lines. And rarely have to fix more than a dozen piddly little things (mostly punctuation or enclosure matching because I code entirely in vanilla vim). I'm not saying everyone should hold themselves to that level but they should at least be able to write a twenty-five line function in one go without having to ask the compiler if they know what they're doing.
Also, if your shit is so monolithic that it compiles slow as hell in Rust, it's going to compile slow in anything else. If you're using modular code for a large project and only change one file, you only rebuild the one file and relink, even in Rust. And it doesn't even need to compile to tell you when you fucked something up at the language level. Your algorithms are of course on you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Monday July 13 2020, @11:17PM (6 children)
I'd you never make mistakes then you either don't know you've made any because you don'tknow where to look or you are regurgitating a boiler-plate solution from memory (in which case you should be reusing not reinventing). If it's the former, you are passing on debugging to your users and technical debt to your colleagues. If it's the latter, you can be scripted.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 14 2020, @12:06AM (5 children)
To begin, I'd +1 Funny you for the typos but I'm out of points.
As to the assertion itself? Compilers can only catch you out making stupid mistakes that can be corrected easily all at once when you're done. They will not tell you if your shiny, happy algorithm (that had damned well better take more than one line) is doing something slightly different than what you meant it to. That's what unit tests, fuzzing, and martybs are for.
To be clear, I wasn't insulting you. You expressed an extreme lack of confidence in your ability to write something correctly the first time. I took you at your word that you can't. I can though. Yes, I may have to recompile half a dozen times when I'm done to fix the few errors I inevitably code in but I will not have to recompile a couple thousand times like you would have.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 14 2020, @10:07AM (4 children)
Typos? It was past midnight and I was on my Android phone. I'd spent the evening doing battle with a micro SD card in an Android tablet. I accidentally formatted it as internal storage and it moved 7.5 GB of data. I had to figure out how to undo it. I learned all about MTD and failed to backup all the data to my laptop. Eventually I found the right pictures to point at on the Android device. Then I took the card out to reformat on my laptop. For the first time in my life I made a typo writing the exfat file system and hosed my laptops's EFI boot partition by mistake, so I had to fix that too.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:10AM (3 children)
Erm, when did we go from coding in a compiled language to system administration? But, yeah, anyone who's spent any significant sysadmin time has an "ARGH!" story or two.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:17PM (2 children)
You asked about the typos and I obliged.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 15 2020, @02:33PM (1 child)
Oh, I meant the ones in the post. If it was intentional, it was funny. If it wasn't, it was even more funny.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 15 2020, @03:17PM
That's why I made typos in the post: I had a stressful late evening culminating in the erasing of my boot partition due to a typo, just to be absolutely clear. Typos everywhere.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @07:39AM (1 child)
not that I disagree with the 25 line function statement, but please note that in C++ with templates and abstract classes on top a small change can lead to a long recompilation time even if your code is technically modular.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:08AM
Fair nuff, and that's a small part of why I despise most templates and macros.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.