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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I finally watched the talk today and that wasn’t what I thought he meant. What I thought he was getting at was that the rust parts of the kernel interact with lots of other modules written by people who don’t know rust. When those C modules change their semantics in ways that break the rust code, they can’t go fix it because they don’t know rust. In fact, whenever they make a change, they don’t even know if they broke some rust module, because they don’t understand the rust code well enough. And this is something that everyone is going to have to live with for the foreseeable future, because you can’t force all those other kernel hackers to learn rust.





  • I haven’t seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

    IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don’t use it as intended. I think they’re mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

    Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach’s performance issues, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

    And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.









  • Haskell is simple in some ways and complicated in others.

    It doesn’t have optional or named parameters. There are no objects or methods. No constructors. It doesn’t distinguish syntactically between procedures and functions. There are no for loops or while loops. && and || aren’t treated specially. It doesn’t even have functions with more than one argument. Every function takes one argument and returns one result.


  • I remember getting into political arguments that went nowhere at the time but resulted in me changing my mind years later. The people I argued with never knew about my change of heart. As far as they knew I was one of those people who get more entrenched in their beliefs.

    What I’m getting at is that your arguments can hit home without looking like it. What you’re seeing as getting defensive could just be the early stages for them changing their minds.

    This can be especially true if someone’s political beliefs are part of their identity. You don’t make those kind of changes all at once.

    So I’d say just argue in good faith, don’t try to score points, provide food for thought if you can, and hope for the other person to eventually find their way to the truth.




  • There are companies working on providing that experience for Linux. System76 is one. You can buy a laptop with their is pre installed. Everything works, including suspend. If something breaks, you call the support number or email and they either talk you through fixing it or sending it in for repair or replacement. It’s not that different from having a Dell or HP.