this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Enter Maestro, a unix-like monolithic kernel that aims to be compatible with Linux in order to ensure wide compatibility. Interestingly, it is written in Rust. It includes Solfége, a boot system and daemon manager, maestro-utils, which is a collection of system utility commands, and blimp, a package manager. According to Luc, it’s creator, the following third-party software has been tested and is working on the OS: musl (C standard library), bash, Some GNU coreutils commands such as ls, cat, mkdir, rm, rmdir, uname, whoami, etc… neofetch (a patched version, since the original neofetch does not know about the OS). If you want to test it out, fire up a VM with at least 1 GB of ram.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Ok, I'm out of the loop and I've seen this often enough that I have to ask; why do people always bring up "written in rust"? No one points out that a given project is written in C++/C#/python/ruby etc, yet we keep seeing it for rust.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you want a real answer, it's mostly advocacy, the same reason Linux enthusiasts show up to every negative-sounding Windows thread to tell you to install Linux instead. And if it is less obnoxious, it's only because there's fewer Rust enthusiasts.

There are, also, advantages to a Rust implementation that you can claim simply by virtue of something being implemented in Rust, as entire categories of problem that cause C projects to hemorrhage security vulnerabilities simply don't exist for Rust.

But mostly it's people wanting you to be excited about and interested in Rust.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Is there something inherently safer with how rust does things, or is it just a case of it being new, so the vulnerabilities haven't been found yet?

[–] [email protected] 84 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, it is inherently safer than C. Unless you write code in an unsafe block, Rust will handle many aspects of memory allocation and management for you, and ensure their safety. It is memory safe and thread safe by default.

C doesn’t have any of these safety checking features, so it would be equivalent to unsafe Rust, but all the time. It lets you do whatever you want with pointers for example, including making them point outside of the memory bounds. In program code, this will cause an illegal memory access exception, but in kernel code, all memory access is legal. Therefore, you could write a driver that accidentally overwrites the kernel’s own code in memory. That would likely cause a kernel panic and bring the whole system down. Whereas, in Rust, you can only do that within an unsafe code block.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Thread safety is a computer programming concept applicable to multi-threaded code. Thread-safe code only manipulates shared data structures in a manner that ensures that all threads behave properly and fulfill their design specifications without unintended interaction. There are various strategies for making thread-safe data structures.A program may execute code in several threads simultaneously in a shared address space where each of those threads has access to virtually all of the memory of every other thread. Thread safety is a property that allows code to run in multithreaded environments by re-establishing some of the correspondences between the actual flow of control and the text of the program, by means of synchronization.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago

Rust has many safeguards against some common errors that may cause security vulnerabilities. It’s by no means bulletproof against all vulnerabilities, but it’s something.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I only know the hype. But the hype says that Rust's ownership system makes memory usage much safer by forcing the coder to deal with data. Your values will eventually go out of scope, and you have to dictate when that will happen or else it won't compile.

...or something like that.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Programmers are hyped about Rust. It’s a programming language that has a legitimate chance to replace C and C++ for performance critical applications. So any new project in Rust increases the possibility of a future where C and C++ are programming languages of the past.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Imo rust won't replace cpp without true Oop so I might just make my own objective rust and piss off Oop haters

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

There has been no true OOP language since smalltalk, which btw wasn't class-based.

In practical terms Rust has subtyping -- barely, at least in technical terms the only thing that uses true subtyping is lifetimes. In practical terms you have qualified types (aka traits) supporting interface inheritance which is perfectly proper as everybody knows that you shouldn't inherit implementation as the Liskov Substitution Principle is undecidable.

"Language X will fail because it's not OO" what's this, the early 00s? I thought we left that hype train behind.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

What is true OOP?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I've never used rust but as you say it really does seem like a good successor to c/c++. It's a modern, more memory safe programming language shat allows you to dig into the weeds if you need it.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Because rust is the modern low level systems language, which means it gotta go fast without all the freaking problems of the only other real alternative so far that was C. The languages you list don't even play in the same ballpark.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But a kernel written in Perl would be a real achievement. Something in a whole different league.

[–] cd_slash_rmrf 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It definitely would be. Next time someone posts a kernel written in Perl I hope they specify that.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Honest question from someone using C++, though not for systems- or embedded stuff, just for object oriented models that gotta go fast: Why is C++ not in the same ballpark, and not an alternative?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Mentioning it's written in rust should imply this code base will have secure concurrency, better memory handling, be easier to extend, while maintaining near C++ performance. None of these are guarantees, but considering so many rust projects are "C/C++ programs, rewritten" it seems worth calling out as a differential. The language's advantages extending to the kernel make it an interesting project.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yes they do? All the time? To the point where github has a bar on every project page showing what percentages of every project is written in which languages?