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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Lol the out of memory error was a joke. A reference to that two people both trying to do the same thing will fill the heap since there’s unnecessary work.

    I tried to make a code joke but it failed.

    As far as what are they unwilling to release? Control. Ownership of any bit of the kernel they control

    kernel maintainer Ted Ts’o, emphatically interjects: “Here’s the thing: you’re not going to force all of us to learn Rust.”

    Lina tried to push small fixes that would make the C code “more robust and the lifetime requirements sensible,” but was blocked by the maintainer.

    DeVault writes. “Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work.”


  • It’s a whole different ballgame. I’ve written a good amount of C and C++ in my day. I’ve been learning Rust for a year or so now. Switching between allocating your own memory and managing it, and the concept of “Ownership” https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.html is just something many devs set in their ways aren’t willing to do.

    I understand where they’re coming from, I’ve gone through massive refactors with new tech in my career. I think this approach needs to be more methodical and cautious than it is, but I don’t think they are correct in the end result. I think a memory-safe language is the way to go, and it needs to happen.

    This to me is a classic software project with no manager and a bunch of devs arguing internally with no clear external goals. There needs to be definitive goals set over a timeline. If someone doesn’t agree after a consensus is reached they can leave the project. But as of now I think as others have said this is 80% infighting, 20% actual work that’s happening.



  • But on the other hand you can’t expect some smaller and smaller subset of the population to primarily just learn C and meet the criteria of a kernel dev.

    I absolutely agree with all your points, and most rust devs would agree, but the general idea is that over time that energy (which would have been spent tweaking malloc and such) should be spent on the rust compiler and memory management systems, which is already magic as someone who as written a lot of c, c++, and spent the better part of a year learning rust. (I’m no expert of course, but I have a pretty decent grasp on the low level memory management of both the Linux kernel and the rust compiler).

    So that over time the effort that would be spent on memory management and kernel functionality can be properly divided. Rust not being efficient somewhere in catching memory faults or managing memory? Fix it. Someone writing unsafe rust code? Fix it.

    I think at the end of the day everyone wants the same thing which is a memory safe kernel, and I think that rust Is being shoehorned into kernel projects too early in places where it shouldn’t be, but I also think there is unnatural resistance to it just because it’s different elsewhere to “how it’s always been done.”








  • Right, the amount of settings you can’t actually change in settings and instead open up a legacy UI modal to change a specific thing is a demonstration that it’s very much lipstick on a pig rather than a core overhaul. There’s so much baggage in keeping Windows backwards compatible for enterprise that I’m not really sure they can get to a point of having a new control panel where everything is organized into a better UI without cutting some of that baggage and doing major refactors, which will break compatibility, and they make the most money from widespread enterprise licenses across massive private and public organizations, not from windows home licenses included with new computers


  • I’m all for an improved UX but the settings app is not an improved UX, it’s taking many different ways to manage windows features and throwing them into arbitrary categories that are constantly getting shifted around.

    How about instead just improving some other Windows control features? Let me filter by name in services.msc and devmgmt.msc. Let me search in gpedit.msc.

    I will say I do appreciate that they’ve finally made those features work under HiDPI without looking like a blurry pixelated mess. Only took 14 years since the first mass market HiDPI display was released, and 23 years since the first 4k monitor




  • This “tech crowd” and “you folks” dichotomy is not helpful at all. Tell people how they can help, volunteer, donate etc, don’t wedge gaps between the same class fighting against the same ruling class. I’m a software engineer. I write open source software. I get that it’s tiring and you can see the worst in people when doing it, but we’re going to have to be better than that if we want to change things.

    And for those reading like the top commenter, don’t sit on your hands and wait for “tech folks” to figure stuff out. It’s us vs. corporate greed, not “us hoping the tech folks save us from corporate greed” or “us tech folks being badgered like we should be some saviors against corporate greed.” Write your representatives to tell them this isn’t ok. Be mindful in your selection when you purchase a vehicle. Ask your tech savvy friends and family what you can do to help. You aren’t helpless in this, and as OP said, just sitting and waiting for something to be fixed or changed doesn’t help the overall goal.