6 ms·

The points made against switching to newer languages are valid. It will cost time, it will cost effort, it will take many years of work to convince stubborn mai

by SCHiM 9y ago

The points made against switching to newer languages are valid. It will cost time, it will cost effort, it will take many years of work to convince stubborn maintainers to switch. But it will not stop _everyone_ from adopting better languages, and their efforts will eventually surpass the older, less secure systems. When there's feature parity, each and every new exploit will be called out: "this wouldn't have happened in our system'. And that is a good thing. There _are_ better alternatives to C. As for the point about how nobody is working on replacements, that's wrong. There's (partial) replacements for most coreutils written in rust, and a whole kernel has been under active development for years now.

jackpot51 9y ago
Yep, I look forward to the day OpenBSD is obsolete. How Theo can be so anal about features like ASLR but then completely disregard the potential of compiler enforced memory safety is beyond my cognitive power.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Considering the complete lack of viable competition in the space, that day is a long way off.
  - jackpot51 9y ago
    Why is Redox not viable competition?
    - busterarm 9y ago
      Are you joking? Are you running large, mission-critical systems in production on Redox already? I'm sure it will be good enough for that some day, but that day is not now.
    - Annatar 9y ago
      Because of GNU/Linux.
    - simias 9y ago
      Come on, I really like Rust but these types of comments are why people like Theo de Raadt don't take the evangelists seriously. You can't take a project like OpenBSD that has existed for more than 20 years, is being used right now to power all kinds of applications around the world on all kinds of architectures and say that Redox, an experimental x86-64 OS, is viable competition. What with the seven applications written for it listed on Wikipedia, including "A simple web browser with basic image support" and "A simple editor that is similar to notepad". I don't know what the driver situation is like but I don't expect to see a lot of support for anything beyond the most basic devices. In general I think the "why don't you rewrite your project in $languageoftheday" remarks should be dismissed and ignored. Theo is entirely right when he says that if people think it's a good idea then they should spend less time bothering the devs about it and more time actually coding it. You think Curl or Emacs should be written in Rust? Then do it. Don't bother the devs about it. If it's really better then people will make the switch.
      - lifty 9y ago
        I love this. I think both of you are right, but your perspectives are for different time frames, with one side having an ideal view about a future time frame, while the other thinking about the now. This is the kind of situation that leads to innovation and how projects like Linux or neovim started. It's a natural way to progress. I hope jackpot51 gets pissed off and takes redox to the point where it proves the naysayers wrong, which will take time and effort, and doesn't serve the now.
        simias 9y ago
        I really hope that redox will eventually become a competitor to OpenBSD and other flagship OSs, I'd love to work on a Rust OS. That being said I still don't think it makes sense to label it a competitor at this stage though. If I decided to start practicing Formula One next week that won't automatically make me competition for Lewis Hamilton. Redox has some way to go before people can seriously consider using it over OpenBSD for real world applications.
        jackpot51 9y ago
    - zaarn 9y ago
      Redox is an unproven toy OS compared to some of the more mature and battletested alternatives. And don't think battletested is a metaphore, some of these have been used to operate battlegear.
    - dewyatt 9y ago
      I feel like you should add a disclosure about being the creator of Redox.
      - thesmallestcat 9y ago
        Ouch, that's not a good look at all.
joshklein 9y ago
I think this misunderstands the OpenBSD philosophy. The more likely it is "everyone else" disagrees, the more likely it is Theo is choosing the right course for the project. The system being secure is a secondary benefit to it being comprehendible and coherent to an individual. It's not enough for the output of a magic box to be a better widget, even if the widget is better in every measurable way. The box itself must not be magic. This isn't "right" or "wrong". It's simply a stance that values an individual's ability to understand their computing device from top to bottom. Rust is an amazing and wonderful piece of technology, produced by a great investment of energy by brilliant minds. I'm incredibly grateful it exists and look forward to it's continued development and adoption. But I'm not brilliant, and I don't have a lot of energy, and so I'm also grateful there exists an operating system I can understand, and other people who continue to work to make that operating system useful. Much open source technology is created by people with a financial incentive for others to use it. That's fine. OpenBSD is written by people who want to use it. It's usefulness to others is coincidental. That's fine too. I'm glad there is so much money funding the development of open and free computing innovations. The world is a much better place for it. But there isn't a lot of money funding the rest of the unix philosophy besides the "open" part, like the parts about composability and anti-monolithic design. Because those things are not valuable in financial terms, and are potentially even destructive towards the purpose of capturing value at all. I am grateful there is a small radical free operating system defending our freedom from monoculture. And I'm similarly glad for their defacto antagonism towards proselytizing of all kinds, even if that proselytizing is done with good intention, and even if that proselytizing turns out to be right. That's why you need to show them the code. When you show the code, it means you understand. Until you understand, you're not free. At least, this is my interpretation. I'm not affiliated with the project in any way. Just a fan.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  As regards understandability and minimising "magic boxes", this means it's pretty much just core OpenBSD (kernel & base system). The moment you add the usual desktop environments or a huge monolith like Firefox, you've lost these benefits. Same with drivers. More drivers you have, more the system becomes byzantine. Keeping things minimal and well designed yet useful must be a continuing challenge for OpenBSD!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ansible 9y ago
As for the point about how nobody is working on replacements, that's wrong. There's (partial) replacements for most coreutils written in rust, and a whole kernel has been under active development for years now. I acknowledge the strong pull to go and re-implement existing standards like POSIX in a new language like Rust. But, having had to again deal with all the corner cases of signal handling and threads for a Linux application, I encourage any prospective Rust OS developers to pick a different path. Please, please, let's move beyond POSIX. Give me a sane set of operating system API calls that work in a reasonable way together. And that can compose easily. So that future developers don't have to deal with file read calls that may (or may not) be interrupted by a signal, and all that.
- erikj 9y ago
  Were there any successful attempts to design a brand new and complete OS API in the last decade?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    UWP, slow and steady, will eventually get there. ChromeOS, the OS APIs are the web platform. iOS, almost everything that matters is done via Cocoa Android, Java reigns. There is very little UNIX exposed to userspace, less so since Google started clamping down NDK since version 7.
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    Not really, but POSIX itself is almost 30 years old (and primarily standardized interfaces that were considerably older), and a lot of interesting stuff happened ca. 1995-2005. See e.g. BeOS or Inferno.
- renox 9y ago
  I find your post quite funny in the context of the topic..
  - ansible 9y ago
    I totally respect (and have donated to) the OpenBSD project, and ran it for years for my firewall machines. Though these days I'm running containerized Linux firewalls for ease of upgrades. Anyway... I do understand OBSD's objections to using a new implementation language for their core utilities. And I understand their philosophy for what they're doing and how they're doing it in the general case. But the fact remains that POSIX, as it has evolved (or not, in some cases) makes writing correct programs harder than necessary. Especially modern multi-threaded programs. I'd like to see something better and simpler. And maybe written in something other than C.

by SCHiM 9y ago

jackpot51 9y ago

Yep, I look forward to the day OpenBSD is obsolete. How Theo can be so anal about features like ASLR but then completely disregard the potential of compiler enforced memory safety is beyond my cognitive power.

busterarm 9y ago
Considering the complete lack of viable competition in the space, that day is a long way off.
- jackpot51 9y ago
  Why is Redox not viable competition?
  - busterarm 9y ago
    Are you joking? Are you running large, mission-critical systems in production on Redox already? I'm sure it will be good enough for that some day, but that day is not now.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Because of GNU/Linux.
  - simias 9y ago
    Come on, I really like Rust but these types of comments are why people like Theo de Raadt don't take the evangelists seriously. You can't take a project like OpenBSD that has existed for more than 20 years, is being used right now to power all kinds of applications around the world on all kinds of architectures and say that Redox, an experimental x86-64 OS, is viable competition. What with the seven applications written for it listed on Wikipedia, including "A simple web browser with basic image support" and "A simple editor that is similar to notepad". I don't know what the driver situation is like but I don't expect to see a lot of support for anything beyond the most basic devices. In general I think the "why don't you rewrite your project in $languageoftheday" remarks should be dismissed and ignored. Theo is entirely right when he says that if people think it's a good idea then they should spend less time bothering the devs about it and more time actually coding it. You think Curl or Emacs should be written in Rust? Then do it. Don't bother the devs about it. If it's really better then people will make the switch.
    - lifty 9y ago
      I love this. I think both of you are right, but your perspectives are for different time frames, with one side having an ideal view about a future time frame, while the other thinking about the now. This is the kind of situation that leads to innovation and how projects like Linux or neovim started. It's a natural way to progress. I hope jackpot51 gets pissed off and takes redox to the point where it proves the naysayers wrong, which will take time and effort, and doesn't serve the now.
      - simias 9y ago
        I really hope that redox will eventually become a competitor to OpenBSD and other flagship OSs, I'd love to work on a Rust OS. That being said I still don't think it makes sense to label it a competitor at this stage though. If I decided to start practicing Formula One next week that won't automatically make me competition for Lewis Hamilton. Redox has some way to go before people can seriously consider using it over OpenBSD for real world applications.
      - jackpot51 9y ago
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Redox is an unproven toy OS compared to some of the more mature and battletested alternatives. And don't think battletested is a metaphore, some of these have been used to operate battlegear.
  - dewyatt 9y ago
    I feel like you should add a disclosure about being the creator of Redox.
    - thesmallestcat 9y ago
      Ouch, that's not a good look at all.

joshklein 9y ago

I think this misunderstands the OpenBSD philosophy. The more likely it is "everyone else" disagrees, the more likely it is Theo is choosing the right course for the project. The system being secure is a secondary benefit to it being comprehendible and coherent to an individual. It's not enough for the output of a magic box to be a better widget, even if the widget is better in every measurable way. The box itself must not be magic. This isn't "right" or "wrong". It's simply a stance that values an individual's ability to understand their computing device from top to bottom. Rust is an amazing and wonderful piece of technology, produced by a great investment of energy by brilliant minds. I'm incredibly grateful it exists and look forward to it's continued development and adoption. But I'm not brilliant, and I don't have a lot of energy, and so I'm also grateful there exists an operating system I can understand, and other people who continue to work to make that operating system useful. Much open source technology is created by people with a financial incentive for others to use it. That's fine. OpenBSD is written by people who want to use it. It's usefulness to others is coincidental. That's fine too. I'm glad there is so much money funding the development of open and free computing innovations. The world is a much better place for it. But there isn't a lot of money funding the rest of the unix philosophy besides the "open" part, like the parts about composability and anti-monolithic design. Because those things are not valuable in financial terms, and are potentially even destructive towards the purpose of capturing value at all. I am grateful there is a small radical free operating system defending our freedom from monoculture. And I'm similarly glad for their defacto antagonism towards proselytizing of all kinds, even if that proselytizing is done with good intention, and even if that proselytizing turns out to be right. That's why you need to show them the code. When you show the code, it means you understand. Until you understand, you're not free. At least, this is my interpretation. I'm not affiliated with the project in any way. Just a fan.

Santosh83 9y ago
As regards understandability and minimising "magic boxes", this means it's pretty much just core OpenBSD (kernel & base system). The moment you add the usual desktop environments or a huge monolith like Firefox, you've lost these benefits. Same with drivers. More drivers you have, more the system becomes byzantine. Keeping things minimal and well designed yet useful must be a continuing challenge for OpenBSD!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ansible 9y ago

As for the point about how nobody is working on replacements, that's wrong. There's (partial) replacements for most coreutils written in rust, and a whole kernel has been under active development for years now. I acknowledge the strong pull to go and re-implement existing standards like POSIX in a new language like Rust. But, having had to again deal with all the corner cases of signal handling and threads for a Linux application, I encourage any prospective Rust OS developers to pick a different path. Please, please, let's move beyond POSIX. Give me a sane set of operating system API calls that work in a reasonable way together. And that can compose easily. So that future developers don't have to deal with file read calls that may (or may not) be interrupted by a signal, and all that.

erikj 9y ago
Were there any successful attempts to design a brand new and complete OS API in the last decade?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  UWP, slow and steady, will eventually get there. ChromeOS, the OS APIs are the web platform. iOS, almost everything that matters is done via Cocoa Android, Java reigns. There is very little UNIX exposed to userspace, less so since Google started clamping down NDK since version 7.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  Not really, but POSIX itself is almost 30 years old (and primarily standardized interfaces that were considerably older), and a lot of interesting stuff happened ca. 1995-2005. See e.g. BeOS or Inferno.
renox 9y ago
I find your post quite funny in the context of the topic..
- ansible 9y ago
  I totally respect (and have donated to) the OpenBSD project, and ran it for years for my firewall machines. Though these days I'm running containerized Linux firewalls for ease of upgrades. Anyway... I do understand OBSD's objections to using a new implementation language for their core utilities. And I understand their philosophy for what they're doing and how they're doing it in the general case. But the fact remains that POSIX, as it has evolved (or not, in some cases) makes writing correct programs harder than necessary. Especially modern multi-threaded programs. I'd like to see something better and simpler. And maybe written in something other than C.