4 ms·

Is this an influential body inside MS? Sounds like good news for the Rust community that a team like this recommends that a bigco like MS explores Rust.

pjmlp 7y ago
MS is already exploring Rust via Azure IoT Edge, VSCode search engine, Actix, Firefox for HoloLens. So it is positive that security group is also pushing for it, alongside .NET and Core Guidelines for C++. Now how much politic weight they are able to carry, remains an open question. If WinDev was more sympathetic towards DevDiv probably Longhorn would have actually happened, as proven by Singularity and Midori.
- bad_user 7y ago
  > probably Longhorn would have actually happened Longhorn would have happened if it were feasible and AFAIK it was one of the reasons for why Windows Vista took so long.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It would be feasible if WinDev had not sabotaged the work, as it became later visible with moving Longhorn design into COM for Vista, followed up by WinRT, with a .NET toolchain designed by WinDev, partially incompatible with standard .NET features. Sinosfky wasn't that keen in having .NET take the lead. Now after Midori, and the way things turned out for UWP, we are coming back full circle with .NET 5, XAML Islands and WinUI.
- roca 7y ago
  Singularity and Midori relied on GC for memory safety, and that was a huge problem for Longhorn/Vista because it was very difficult to write code that would work reliably when memory is critically low. Rust is a completely different story. Sure, Rust's standard library treats OOM is fatal, which is the right thing for almost all application code, but it's not difficult to create Rust libraries that treat OOM as a recoverable error, or that don't allocate at all. If the Singularity group had invented Rust instead of Sing# things might have turned out differently.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Yet according to MSR Midori had no issues powering a portion of Bing in production. Multiple OSes have been written in GC enabled system languages. Having a GC doesn't mean all memory is required to be GC allocated on the heap, usually the same mechanisms of a language like C++ are also available, e.g. Modula-3, System C#, D and so forth. Joe Duffy clearly states in one of his Midori talks that WinDev did not believe in Midori, even with it running in front of them.
_bxg1 7y ago
Agreed. Mozilla and Cloudflare and Dropbox are great, but given the language's ambitions it would be a huge benefit to have real commitment from one of the big five.

pjmlp 7y ago

MS is already exploring Rust via Azure IoT Edge, VSCode search engine, Actix, Firefox for HoloLens. So it is positive that security group is also pushing for it, alongside .NET and Core Guidelines for C++. Now how much politic weight they are able to carry, remains an open question. If WinDev was more sympathetic towards DevDiv probably Longhorn would have actually happened, as proven by Singularity and Midori.

bad_user 7y ago
> probably Longhorn would have actually happened Longhorn would have happened if it were feasible and AFAIK it was one of the reasons for why Windows Vista took so long.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It would be feasible if WinDev had not sabotaged the work, as it became later visible with moving Longhorn design into COM for Vista, followed up by WinRT, with a .NET toolchain designed by WinDev, partially incompatible with standard .NET features. Sinosfky wasn't that keen in having .NET take the lead. Now after Midori, and the way things turned out for UWP, we are coming back full circle with .NET 5, XAML Islands and WinUI.
roca 7y ago
Singularity and Midori relied on GC for memory safety, and that was a huge problem for Longhorn/Vista because it was very difficult to write code that would work reliably when memory is critically low. Rust is a completely different story. Sure, Rust's standard library treats OOM is fatal, which is the right thing for almost all application code, but it's not difficult to create Rust libraries that treat OOM as a recoverable error, or that don't allocate at all. If the Singularity group had invented Rust instead of Sing# things might have turned out differently.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Yet according to MSR Midori had no issues powering a portion of Bing in production. Multiple OSes have been written in GC enabled system languages. Having a GC doesn't mean all memory is required to be GC allocated on the heap, usually the same mechanisms of a language like C++ are also available, e.g. Modula-3, System C#, D and so forth. Joe Duffy clearly states in one of his Midori talks that WinDev did not believe in Midori, even with it running in front of them.

_bxg1 7y ago

Agreed. Mozilla and Cloudflare and Dropbox are great, but given the language's ambitions it would be a huge benefit to have real commitment from one of the big five.