pslam

10 ms·

61.
by pslam 10y ago
* can I get a good job programming in this? Without moving to another country or continent. Yes, there are many large companies which are either actively deploying Rust, or planning to. Easily found if you search. * is my industry showing i
62.
by pslam 10y ago
The problem is it takes more than just implementing the "kernel" (as in low-level access aka HAL) work under L4. You need to apply that compartmentalization all the way through the stack, and even subdivide applications into small
63.
by pslam 10y ago
If you scan through the source (on github), the most notable thing is the lack of the "unsafe" keyword. I've seen too many people basically transliterate from C to Rust, along with all the unsafe operations. This one is prett
64.
by pslam 10y ago
> Though such cases have been few and far between, soundness bugs have shown up in Rust, and some oddities in the way RAII works have lead to the notion of Prepooping your pants[1] to avoid use-after-free bugs. There's a huge differ
65.
by pslam 10y ago
I think it's fair to have a high level of confidence in freedom from arbitrary code execution, buffer overruns, double frees, etc. It does not, however, follow that it will be free from leaks of secrets. There are plenty of ways to lea
66.
by pslam 10y ago
I know it's not the point, but having this publicly available in such a usable form - even with this bare minimum UI - is a huge milestone. A big barrier to adoption I hear from many potential users is, "Are there any big users of
67.
by pslam 10y ago
Looking at the coding patterns used in the C source, I am utterly horrified this is running live on a public facing website. I can see at least one buffer overrun dependent on database contents, and I wouldn't be surprised if there&#x2
68.
by pslam 10y ago
> If your goal is purely to make Rust as safe as possible, then you should advocate the view in your comment. > If your goal is to increase Rust adoption, and/or decrease the use of less safe languages for development in the futu
69.
by pslam 10y ago
> if the performance cost can be made low enough I think that's the wrong way to look at it. How about instead: "Checks can be disabled if the safety cost is worth the performance increase" The "performance case"
70.
by pslam 10y ago
> 2. Run-time panics. This includes "index out of bound" errors, integer overflow errors (in debug builds only), and assertions inserted by the programmer. This is Rust's second line of defense, so to speak. I still argue,
71.
by pslam 10y ago
> The joys of IT. Back in the day, to wipe years of records you had to burn or shred tons of paper in multiple locations. Now you just crash one little system. [...] most organizations will still have a single backup system for any given
72.
by pslam 10y ago
The short version is: as small or large as you want to trade-off convenience vs performance vs size. I've made useful firmware for a micro-controller (yes in Rust) which is just 5KB. You can, as the article shows how, dynamically link
73.
by pslam 10y ago
I very much believe overflow checking should be on for release builds, and not just debug. Overflow is defined by the language as an illegal operation, but if it's only enabled by debug builds, then it's effectively defined as &qu
74.
by pslam 10y ago
> Up to now, their customers have demanded performance. It's not their fault for listening to them. I disagree - it is almost entirely their fault for listening to them. Customers usually don't know what they really want. &quot
75.
by pslam 11y ago
There are roughly 4x as many iOS, Android (and runners-up) sales and growing. The graphs continue to trend in that direction. IDC is infamous for continuing to make useless comparisons which show PC sales to be better than they are. Possibl
76.
by pslam 11y ago
> 10/20 years later x86 is everywhere from the Macs to high end servers to lowliest tablets. The latest Atoms are actually very good. 10/20 years later, ARM represents the vast majority of both volume and profit in home persona
77.
by pslam 11y ago
> “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for
78.
by pslam 11y ago
On the non-x86 side, ARM has had this for a VERY long time. Certainly at last since ARMv7-A onward, and I think even before that. Pretty much any core in "Cortex-A" series (e.g popular Cortex-A8, A15, A57) has support for fast, fl
79.
by pslam 11y ago
Nerd bashing, at scale.
80.
by pslam 11y ago
Funnily enough, one of the uses of these monster FPGAs is for simulating and prototyping ASIC designs.
81.
by pslam 11y ago
This is exactly what I'm saying. "DMA" as the parent puts it implies a core in the same SoC, rather than external. It would be hair brained to let this have unfiltered access to the fabric. However, that's exactly how ol
82.
by pslam 11y ago
I picked a terrible example which doesn't demonstrate what I intended to. Any USB link requires the host to maintain some persistent state in data structures mirroring what it thinks the state of the device is. There's no "DM
83.
by pslam 11y ago
> On the Neo900, the modem is connected via USB (bus; there is no physical connector) which means it doesn't have DMA. You'll find the modem on most smartphones is connected via USB - or rather its chip-to-chip version, HSIC. F
84.
by pslam 11y ago
I never stopped caring. It just turns out it never really mattered for a large fraction of cases. There's still plenty of cases where you absolutely do care: low level firmware, kernels, absolute performance, and high reliability. It&#
85.
by pslam 11y ago
The only possible ways you can believe you can write issue-free large scale projects in C, which don't suffer from all the usual pitfalls of C, are: * You've never deployed one. * You've never had to maintain one. * You wrote
86.
by pslam 11y ago
Is this parody? You've written a list of coding practices which assure job security for folks like me, who have to undo these gross portability problems, bugs, and security vulnerabilities these result in. for (int i = 0; i < 10
87.
by pslam 11y ago
I had to explain the same thing to an engineering team the other day. There was a push to switch from a "fast but ok" compression algorithm to a "faster and better" compression algorithm. This seemed like win-win, but I
88.
by pslam 11y ago
The point is atomicity doesn't work like this on x86, ARM and most architectures. It's the right conclusion from the wrong analysis. The difference in speed will be the time consumed by managing a packed bitmap, not due to the ato
89.
by pslam 11y ago
This sounds wrong to me, too. For the single core case, there's no such thing as an atomic byte store - the underlying mechanism reads a cache line and modifies it. The same goes for a bit operation (possibly needing more instructions)
90.
by pslam 11y ago
No, but the software impact of choosing a particular piece of hardware should absolutely be part of the system design process. If it is not, then you are part of a project with bad leadership, or very, very old-fashioned architects. It&#x27

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