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What are you even talking about? First of all, the people working on the language are obviously not going to be the people implementing the OS. There's only so

What are you even talking about? First of all, the people working on the language are obviously not going to be the people implementing the OS. There's only so many hours in a day, and a language as large as Rust, Haskell are a full-time job to maintain. Rust has a bunch of hobby OS projects, and a very serious OS project called Redox OS[0]. Redox has a libc that's complete enough to allow it to run bash and other existing programs. It has a complete graphics stack, including its own compositor and UI toolkit. Meanwhile, Microsoft is actively testing Rust as a language, both for new components and rewriting old code that would traditionally be written in C/C++[1]. They're doing this because memory safety bugs account for 70% of their critical bugs[2]. This is a major player in the industry, actively looking at a memory-safe language because they find C or C++ to be inadequate. If that's not validation enough, I don't know what is. [0]: https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/ [1]: https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/11/07/using-rust-in-windows/ https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/11/07/using-rust-in-win... [2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-security-bugs-are-memory-safety-issues/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

nineteen999 6y ago
Never said it had to be the language developers themselves to implement a modern OS, my implied meaning was the vocal proponents of the languages. I think that was fairly clear, and I don't know why you've jumped to that assumption. Everybody who reads HN regularly with an interest in OS design and security and application security has heard of [0], and [2]. [1] simply says that Microsoft is "exploring" Rust, for an "experimental" rewrite of a low level component. That's it. No shipping code yet. I agree its a good step forward, but let's not overstate the impact just yet. If you consider that "validation enough", that's fine, but many others will disagree at this early stage, especially in context of displacing an entire ecosystem of C/C++ based systems and languages. Lastly, Redox is a great example of what I'm talking about, people actually putting their money where their mouth is, and I think it's great to see. It also has 0% adoption outside of a small group of developers right now, and clearly has a long way to go. However by shipping a libc in order to support C programs, they risk exposing application security issues in exactly the same manner as the type of systems they are trying to replace (surely), unless they are prepared to develop additional proven mitigations. Kudos to them for trying, but it remains to be seen whether they even get enough momentum to threaten, yet alone displace the incumbents. Surely history has shown that those platforms with the "killer applications" are those most likely to succeed, and that many elegant and better designed systems than UNIX/Windows have lost out to pragmatism on the part of customers/consumers.
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nineteen999 6y ago

Never said it had to be the language developers themselves to implement a modern OS, my implied meaning was the vocal proponents of the languages. I think that was fairly clear, and I don't know why you've jumped to that assumption. Everybody who reads HN regularly with an interest in OS design and security and application security has heard of [0], and [2]. [1] simply says that Microsoft is "exploring" Rust, for an "experimental" rewrite of a low level component. That's it. No shipping code yet. I agree its a good step forward, but let's not overstate the impact just yet. If you consider that "validation enough", that's fine, but many others will disagree at this early stage, especially in context of displacing an entire ecosystem of C/C++ based systems and languages. Lastly, Redox is a great example of what I'm talking about, people actually putting their money where their mouth is, and I think it's great to see. It also has 0% adoption outside of a small group of developers right now, and clearly has a long way to go. However by shipping a libc in order to support C programs, they risk exposing application security issues in exactly the same manner as the type of systems they are trying to replace (surely), unless they are prepared to develop additional proven mitigations. Kudos to them for trying, but it remains to be seen whether they even get enough momentum to threaten, yet alone displace the incumbents. Surely history has shown that those platforms with the "killer applications" are those most likely to succeed, and that many elegant and better designed systems than UNIX/Windows have lost out to pragmatism on the part of customers/consumers.

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