6 ms·

You may have been thinking of NetBSD. NetBSD prides itself on a very broad platform support.

midmagico 3y ago
Maybe in the 1990s. Now, try getting it running even on a network edge platform like those from Netgate. NetBSD's hardware support is singularly unstable and unusable. Most new platforms port to Linux, commit drivers to the Linux kernel, and ignore the other platforms. The other platforms don't really seem to bother anymore, unfortunately. Things have bit-rotted to such an extent that FS will destroy large amounts of data and.. nobody seems to notice. Kernel panic reports are ignored. Debuggers fail to set functional breakpoints on native hardware. CPU quirks that need workaround to prevent panics are never committed. Meanwhile, developing this kind of expertise is about as far from the minds of younger experimenters and hackers now as baking cakes and permaculture gardening were from the 00s hardware hackers decades ago. Not only is it far from the minds of younger experimenters, but even attempting to develop it hits a hard wall of hardcore, draconian behavioural purists, secops fashionistas who deride essentially any burgeoning attempts at writing drivers, and language revolutionaries who rage extensively at people for writing any new code in any language but their own favourite. The situation is pretty harsh and it's likely not going to get any better anytime soon.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
No, I meant FreeBSD, though NetBSD is (much) further on the same spectrum. If I read that Darwin or NT were looking at using Rust, I'd figure that was easy enough; they more or less only target x86 and ARM, which are mostly well-covered by Rust. If NetBSD said they were moving to Rust... I dunno, I'd assume that either Rust had really changed their approach to platform support, or that NetBSD as I knew it had ceased to exist. OpenBSD is actually also on that far end of the spectrum, because they care even more about self-hosting, which means that the inability of rustc to actually run (or at least self-host) on 32-bit x86 is a hard blocker. FreeBSD is in the middle; I knew they don't intend to hit as many hardware platforms as their siblings, but I still thought they had broader coverage than rustc. And (per the page I linked) they used to, but as of the latest releases they've been really cutting down their targets. Which... I dunno, it's practical, but still sad. I guess there's at least still OpenBSD and NetBSD to cover portability.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Darwin isn't going to do Rust. Apple's plan is that Swift can be made to do everything necessary for their operating system. Since Apple are bad at doing more than one thing, they've settled on the idea of a single successor language, chosen under advice but by senior management. So, Swift. Unless it proves impossible to use Swift (and I doubt it) that's what they'll do. For everything above the line, Swift is definitely viable today. Expect shiny new stuff from Apple to be Swift first, or even sometimes Swift only. If you're an Apple First developer, you should learn Swift, or you are going to be relegated to maintaining legacy software in the next maybe 3-5 years. Microsoft is already solidly on the Rust bandwagon. So yes, Rust for NT is very possible. Unlike Apple though the Microsoft corporation has always been able to do a bunch of things at once, even if it doesn't always do them all well -- it doesn't need a singular focus to achieve success. So don't expect Microsoft to magically pull effort off C++ and .NET to do more Rust.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    > Since Apple are bad at doing more than one thing, they've settled on the idea of a single successor language, chosen under advice but by senior management. So, Swift. Apple has been using Rust for years, and I'm not aware of any decisions to move away from that, though given how secretive they are, I guess that could be a possibility. > So yes, Rust for NT is very possible. Rust is already being shipped (in preview) in Windows' kernel.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Apple's John McCall makes a picture of where they are going with Swift in "Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw
      - steveklabnik 3y ago
        Of course Apple continues to invest into Swift, making it better and writing more code in it. There's no doubt about that. This is an hour long talk. I don't see anything in the slides that indicates that Apple management has decreed that Swift is the sole successor language to C++, forsaking all others, and winding down their Rust codebases. Could you help me find out where that is in this talk?

Maybe in the 1990s. Now, try getting it running even on a network edge platform like those from Netgate. NetBSD's hardware support is singularly unstable and unusable. Most new platforms port to Linux, commit drivers to the Linux kernel, and ignore the other platforms. The other platforms don't really seem to bother anymore, unfortunately. Things have bit-rotted to such an extent that FS will destroy large amounts of data and.. nobody seems to notice. Kernel panic reports are ignored. Debuggers fail to set functional breakpoints on native hardware. CPU quirks that need workaround to prevent panics are never committed. Meanwhile, developing this kind of expertise is about as far from the minds of younger experimenters and hackers now as baking cakes and permaculture gardening were from the 00s hardware hackers decades ago. Not only is it far from the minds of younger experimenters, but even attempting to develop it hits a hard wall of hardcore, draconian behavioural purists, secops fashionistas who deride essentially any burgeoning attempts at writing drivers, and language revolutionaries who rage extensively at people for writing any new code in any language but their own favourite. The situation is pretty harsh and it's likely not going to get any better anytime soon.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

No, I meant FreeBSD, though NetBSD is (much) further on the same spectrum. If I read that Darwin or NT were looking at using Rust, I'd figure that was easy enough; they more or less only target x86 and ARM, which are mostly well-covered by Rust. If NetBSD said they were moving to Rust... I dunno, I'd assume that either Rust had really changed their approach to platform support, or that NetBSD as I knew it had ceased to exist. OpenBSD is actually also on that far end of the spectrum, because they care even more about self-hosting, which means that the inability of rustc to actually run (or at least self-host) on 32-bit x86 is a hard blocker. FreeBSD is in the middle; I knew they don't intend to hit as many hardware platforms as their siblings, but I still thought they had broader coverage than rustc. And (per the page I linked) they used to, but as of the latest releases they've been really cutting down their targets. Which... I dunno, it's practical, but still sad. I guess there's at least still OpenBSD and NetBSD to cover portability.

tialaramex 3y ago
Darwin isn't going to do Rust. Apple's plan is that Swift can be made to do everything necessary for their operating system. Since Apple are bad at doing more than one thing, they've settled on the idea of a single successor language, chosen under advice but by senior management. So, Swift. Unless it proves impossible to use Swift (and I doubt it) that's what they'll do. For everything above the line, Swift is definitely viable today. Expect shiny new stuff from Apple to be Swift first, or even sometimes Swift only. If you're an Apple First developer, you should learn Swift, or you are going to be relegated to maintaining legacy software in the next maybe 3-5 years. Microsoft is already solidly on the Rust bandwagon. So yes, Rust for NT is very possible. Unlike Apple though the Microsoft corporation has always been able to do a bunch of things at once, even if it doesn't always do them all well -- it doesn't need a singular focus to achieve success. So don't expect Microsoft to magically pull effort off C++ and .NET to do more Rust.
- steveklabnik 3y ago
  > Since Apple are bad at doing more than one thing, they've settled on the idea of a single successor language, chosen under advice but by senior management. So, Swift. Apple has been using Rust for years, and I'm not aware of any decisions to move away from that, though given how secretive they are, I guess that could be a possibility. > So yes, Rust for NT is very possible. Rust is already being shipped (in preview) in Windows' kernel.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Apple's John McCall makes a picture of where they are going with Swift in "Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Of course Apple continues to invest into Swift, making it better and writing more code in it. There's no doubt about that. This is an hour long talk. I don't see anything in the slides that indicates that Apple management has decreed that Swift is the sole successor language to C++, forsaking all others, and winding down their Rust codebases. Could you help me find out where that is in this talk?