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That may just be the impression given by tutorials, which spend most of their time dealing with the hardware. In a real OS, you'd wrap that up in safe interface
by Rusky 11y ago
That may just be the impression given by tutorials, which spend most of their time dealing with the hardware. In a real OS, you'd wrap that up in safe interfaces and then the core of things like scheduling, file systems, etc. could be in a safe layer on top of the unsafe drivers.
- cwzwarich 11y agoBut has anyone actually done that? Can you even express those as safe interfaces in Rust?
- Jweb_Guru 11y agoIMO, the answers to those questions are "no" and "yes" respectively. Redox in particular seems like it has way more unsafe code than it actually has to (though it seems to have gotten a bit better very recently).
- chadaustin 11y agoIt's the same thing with Haskell, or any other "real" system that, at some level, has to interface with low-level primitives. The platform gives you a pile of unsafe, low-level primitives ( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-prim-0.4.0.0/docs/GHC-Prim.html https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-prim-0.4.0.0/docs/GH... ) on top of which you (or a library writer) can provide safe interfaces, e.g. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/buffer-builder https://hackage.haskell.org/package/buffer-builder
- MaxGabriel 11y agoThe unsafe low-level stuff gives rise to some great function names like `reallyUnsafePtrEquality` and `accursedUnutterablePerformIO` https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/blob/dd3c07d115840d13482426a0084a39201eb6b6d4/Data/ByteString/Internal.hs#L515-L546 https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/blob/dd3c07d115840d134...