A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 6:21 UTC (Wed) by milesrout (subscriber, #126894)
In reply to: A pair of Rust kernel modules by rav
Parent article: A pair of Rust kernel modules

Which has still taken 4 years longer than it had any reason to take. C++ and Haskell have both had these features for years. There's a huge amount of prior art. There's no excuse for it to take this long.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 11:30 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

I absolutely love it that they had 5 years to reflect and make sure that it doesn't introduce any subtle warts and that it integrates well into not only current but also upcoming features of the language. It will be with us until forever, after all, and you can't fix it once it's delivered. For the same reason I'm excited about the evolution of Java (yes! Java!). Some of the features there (like Project Valhalla) have been baking for even longer than that. AND IT'S A GOOD THING. Brian Goetz, who leads these efforts, even says that if after all this time someone says "Why on earth did it take you so long? It's such a simple and obvious feature!", then it means that this was time well spent. Because if they delivered it sooner, then it would neither be simple nor obvious.

Python, on the other hand... ;)

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 11:47 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Brian Goetz, who leads these efforts, even says that if after all this time someone says "Why on earth did it take you so long? It's such a simple and obvious feature!", then it means that this was time well spent. Because if they delivered it sooner, then it would neither be simple nor obvious.

Cleanliness and simplicity in design is just SO important! I go on about WordPerfect, about INFORMATION (sadly defunct but my favourite Pick), precisely *because* they set out to have simple logic / design and clean implementation.

I've been tripping over a Word bug for ages, and I've suddenly realised the problem - if a table extends over multiple pages it screws up printing! When printing labels, I often have grief with the printer so I get the first page and nothing else. If you try to start printing from page 2, it seems Word gets lost, assumes the entire table is on page 1, and prints nothing! WTF?

Cheers,
Wol

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 15:42 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

Try printing to PDF first (Windows nowadays has a built-in virtual printer for that), then printing out that PDF. That workaround can sometimes work wonders for applications that don't handle printers and their quirks very well.

It's sad of course that workaround like this are needed for any application, and double (or more) so for a high-profile word processor.

A pair of Rust kernel modules

Posted Sep 14, 2022 15:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> There's no excuse for it to take this long.

Seriously? Modern, multithreaded OS kernels exist which means you should be able to create something like that in jiffy. Show me how, please. After we would benchmark it and compare to Linux and other popular kernels you would have a case.

> C++ and Haskell have both had these features for years.

And in both cases it took more than a decade to develop these. I still remember time when rebind only existed in the standard, but not in G++.

> There's a huge amount of prior art.

The fact that there are “huge amount of prior art” doesn't assert certain feature is easy, sorry.