Zig is “c”, but modern and safe.

Zig is safer than C, but not on a level that is comparable to Rust, so it lacks its biggest selling point. Unfortunately just being a more modern language is not enough to sell it.

So imagine if trying to fit in a C-like cousin failed

C++ was not added to Linux because Linus Torvalds thought it was an horrible language, not because it was not possible to integrate in the kernel.

No, macros can see only the tokens you give them. They have no notion of the fact that crate::functions is a module, that PluginFunction is a trait and that functions_map is a variable. Not even the compiler may know those informations when the macro is expanded.

If you really really want to do this, you can use something like inventory. Note that inventory uses a special linker section to do this, which some consider a hack. This is also not supported on WASM if you want to target it.

Would it makes sense to provide a “share nothing” runtime implementation that can be injected at startup?

Isn’t this tokio::task::spawn_local?

It also seems to require a GC though…

newxml is GC only, for simplicity sake.

Pointers are not guaranteed to be safe

So I guess they are forbidden in @safe mode?

but it’s being replaced by something else instead

Do you know what is the replacement? I tried looking up DIP1000 but it only says “superceded” without mentioning by what.

This makes me wonder how ready D is for someone that wants to extensively use @safe though.

For local variables, one should use pointers, otherwise ref does references that are guaranteed to be valid to their lifetime, and thus have said limitations.

Should I take this to mean that pointers instead are not guaranteed to be valid, and thus are not memory safe?

Note that Rust does not “solve” memory management for you, it just checks whether yours is memory safe. Initially you might rely on the borrow checker for those checks, but as you become more and more used to Rust you’ll start to anticipate it and write code that already safisfies it. So ultimately you’ll still learn how to safely deal with memory management, just in a different way.

Rust for Linux used to be developed in parallel to the mainline Linux before Linus Torvalds merged support in the main tree.

“safe by default” can be done by starting your files with @safe:

Last time I heard about that it was much more limited than Rust, for example it even disallowed taking references to local variables. Has something changed since then?

But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was.

IMO that tells more about how the project was organized and names things than the language used.

So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

As the other commenter pointed out, there’s Redox. The issue is that this completly disregards an incremental approach: you have to rewrite everything before it comes usable, you can’t do it piece by piece. Currently the approach of Rust for Linux is not even to rewrite things, but to allow writing new drivers in Rust.

Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.

Have you seen the conference video? That’s not just refusal to learn a new language, it’s open hostility. And it’s not the only instance, for example Asahi Lina also reported unreasonable behaviour by some maintainers just because she wrote Rust code, even when Rust was not involved.

That doesn’t really excuse its behavior in the video though.

compile rust 0.7 in scala

Not sure if there was another rewrite, but AFAIK (and the article agrees with me) rustc was originally written in Ocaml

Have you actually measured a performance impact from RefCell checks?

High or low level doesn’t matter. Mathematically it just makes more sense to use 0-based indexing https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html

It’s mentioned in footnote 6:

As an example, to make this work I’m assuming some kind of “true deref” trait that indicates that Deref yields a reference that remains valid even as the value being deref’d moves from place to place. We need a trait much like this for other reasons too.

It would only work for references that are stable after the value they reference is moved. Think for example of a &str you get from a String.

Can’t those be installed in toolbox?

Metro UI toggle buttons were rectangular though.

GNOME devs never said that theming is incompatible (just “not supported”), and you’re still not explaining whay you mean with “incompatible” either. Managing window controls also doesn’t seem a requirement to be “compatible”, as the app still runs fine even with client side decorations (again, it just won’t fit visually with the rest of the system).

And by the way, the problem is not theming per-se, but the fact that apps get themed by default, they inevitably break by default, and app developers are left to deal with that. Nobody ever tried to improve the situation so the solution they came up with is to have their apps always look the same.

How about when the theming is baked in and impossible to change?

It can still be changed, it’s just a harder to do so.

It’s about doing things that go against the interests of the user.

This conveniently ignores that app developers are also users of ui frameworks, and they would like a well defined platform to test for, rather than an endless stream of distros each with its own theme that could break their app.

Libadwaita is only compatible with gnome and only works with gnome. Other DE’s can try to make it work in their DE, but the experience for them is hostile.

Not sure what you mean with “compatible”, as libadwaita apps are supposed to work on other DEs as well. It might not fit visually with them, but that’s not being incompatible.