4 ms·

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth or anything. I am quite curious which parts you think would better benefit from a rewrite in a safer language if

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth or anything. I am quite curious which parts you think would better benefit from a rewrite in a safer language if you might elaborate. Thanks!

dikaiosune 9y ago
Oh no worries, I might have come off a bit defensive there. I think one of the clearest examples would be drivers -- they might be properly sandboxed by a good microkernel, but they are notoriously buggy/crashy/incorrect. If I remember correctly one of the Fuchsia team members told me that they were going to support drivers written in Rust, but I could be completely wrong. Filesystems, the network stack, whatever horrifying systemd equivalent Fuchsia grows, etc. are all examples of things I would advocate for writing in Rust before focusing on the kernel. All of these things are still security/reliability sensitive, all still terrible by Rustacean safety standards in most OSes, and conveniently don't have to be built directly as part of the kernel when you're doing a microkernel. Just spitballing, of course.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Some filesystems and the network stack from Fuchsia are written in Go.
  - dikaiosune 9y ago
    Cool! Accomplishes many of the same goals that doing it in Rust would, arguably. I would be curious to hear about what sort of latency-management techniques they've used to build an FS in a GC'd environment.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Here is some more information https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror?language=go https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror?language=go https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1PgTXAwAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1P... Regarding your specific latency issue with a GC systems language, here is a Mesa/Cedar example about a network file server. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-6.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-6.pdf

Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth or anything. I am quite curious which parts you think would better benefit from a rewrite in a safer language if you might elaborate. Thanks!

dikaiosune 9y ago

Oh no worries, I might have come off a bit defensive there. I think one of the clearest examples would be drivers -- they might be properly sandboxed by a good microkernel, but they are notoriously buggy/crashy/incorrect. If I remember correctly one of the Fuchsia team members told me that they were going to support drivers written in Rust, but I could be completely wrong. Filesystems, the network stack, whatever horrifying systemd equivalent Fuchsia grows, etc. are all examples of things I would advocate for writing in Rust before focusing on the kernel. All of these things are still security/reliability sensitive, all still terrible by Rustacean safety standards in most OSes, and conveniently don't have to be built directly as part of the kernel when you're doing a microkernel. Just spitballing, of course.

pjmlp 9y ago
Some filesystems and the network stack from Fuchsia are written in Go.
- dikaiosune 9y ago
  Cool! Accomplishes many of the same goals that doing it in Rust would, arguably. I would be curious to hear about what sort of latency-management techniques they've used to build an FS in a GC'd environment.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Here is some more information https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror?language=go https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror?language=go https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1PgTXAwAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/2xuYHcP0Fdc/tKb1P... Regarding your specific latency issue with a GC systems language, here is a Mesa/Cedar example about a network file server. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-6.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-6.pdf