Quote of the week

[Posted October 16, 2024 by corbet]

I'm all for moving the kernel to a less error prone programming language. I've done ADA programming in my former professional live and I'm well aware about the advantages of a "safe" programming language.
For me Rust is definitely the right way to go, aside of my personal distaste of the syntax and the insanity of abandoning an existing universe of ADA tools just because of 'not invented here', but that's a different discussion to be had.
That said, converging to Rust requires a massive effort of being disciplined on the C side in the first place. Otherwise the Rust abstractions will just end up being a mostly useless wrapper around the existing C insanities. Which in turn will neither reduce technical debt, nor be able to hold up the promise to squash a whole class of bugs.
Quite the contrary it will accelerate the problems we already have instead of reducing them, while everyone can pretend that we are so much better off.
TBH, converging to Rust is a real chance to move away from the "features first, correctness later" approach, but the way our community is approaching it right now is just following the old scheme by making Rust compatible to the "features first, correctness later" mantra.

— Thomas Gleixner

I miss Ada.

Posted Oct 17, 2024 22:21 UTC (Thu) by acarno (subscriber, #123476) [Link] (2 responses)

I've found it's difficult to truly convey the experience of a memory-safe language like Ada to someone who has spent the vast majority of their career working with C or C++. Yes, you spend significantly more time wrestling with the compiler, at least to start. And yes, it forces you into certain coding paradigms that will seem unfamiliar ("it's just an enum, why do I have to explicitly cast it to an integer?").

But once you've learned to stop fighting the language and follow the paradigms it enforces, the power of _knowing_ that your code can't segfault, of being able to _prove_ that (barring a hardware failure) your code executes correctly... it makes each and every off-by-one error you encounter in a language like C all that more frustrating.

I digress. Back to debugging my indices manually.

I miss Ada.

Posted Oct 21, 2024 8:55 UTC (Mon) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

> to someone who has spent the vast majority of their career working with C or C++

C++ devs who use destructors can relay to this feeling. It becomes trivial to not have leaks.
OCD of them become slightly frustrated with inability to say "v.leak()" before exiting program.

In theory arch/arm64 and arch/x86_64 could be rewritten in Rust fully.
i386 too if someone proclaims i386 NotMuseum Architecture.

Ada was also easy to read

Posted Oct 22, 2024 1:52 UTC (Tue) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]

Like Cobol, Ada uses full English words (Procedure <name> to declare a procedure, start to start it, end <name> to end it. Loops are surrounded by "loop" and "end loop"). It was designed (like Cobol) for readability. https://www.adaic.org/advantages/ada-overview/ for some information on the design.

I like design for readability - it makes maintenance much easier (IMO). Comments are nice, but can get out of sync with the actual code if the programmers editing code don't update the comments. Also, design for readability, IMO, makes it easier to learn the language. You're already familiar with the words. Someone with computer programming skills but know knowledge of Ada can probably figure out what a program does, because of the readability.

I'm not familiar with Rust other than what I've read on websites like lwn.net, but in terms of some of the core design, from what I've read, they're similar. Avoid "Undefined Behavior." Check up front for issues (at compile time). Define "correct behavior" specifically, and make it hard to not do the right thing. Design for guaranteed behavior.

Unfortunately, initial compilers were slow, and slow to improve, due to various reasons (including, as I recall, mandatory compliance testing before you could use the name).