I hope it's copyleft.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2022
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maybe they are afraid of redox :) I'm looking forward to test a Unix like OS with a Kernel written completely from scratch in Rust
I think, they're simply aware that few young devs learn C these days. The former Lingua Franca is declining in popularity and if they still want to have devs in twenty years, they need to start making a move now. Porting the whole kernel to a different language is going to take a long time...
Hmm, but I hear from many students that they at least had a contact with C. In my opinion the problem with C is, that you have to take care of too many things, e.g memory and pointer management, which can fast turn into really difficult to understand code, especially when you're dealing with many libraries. Having a language which helps in memory management is a very big help and lead's to more stable code
I've had contact with C in a course in university, too, but I never felt anywhere close to as productive as with e.g. Java. Learning C felt more like a historic exhibition than like learning a tool I would actually use.
And yeah, there's this saying/quote, which goes something like "code is low-level when it concerns itself with uninteresting details". And C definitely feels like that to me.
Rust has kind of broken that saying, because it allows low-level machine access, but actually offers rather high-level abstractions.
I mean, you do notice that Rust doesn't use garbage collection, so that is one detail which I largely deem uninteresting as a human that just wants to make things go beep-boop, but yeah, it is still an enormous improvement in the uninteresting details department.
Does it run on any modern hardware?
How great is Rust without an operating system? I mean that hosted C++ implementations are great with their algorithms and whatnot, but freestanding implementations don't actually add too much to plain C.
Firefox trusts Rust, I distrust Rust. It's as simple as that.
In the end you can't trust any high level programming language. Nobody looks into the generated assembler code, or reads and understands all the vm's/interpreter...
Well I distrust Mozilla; so I'm neutral on this opinion.