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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You cited Git as an example, but in Git it’s possible to e.g. force-push a branch and if someone later fetches it with no previous knowledge they will get the original version.

    The problem is the “with non previous knowledge” and is the reason this isn’t a storage issue. The way you would solve this in git would be to fetch a specific commit, i.e. you need to already know the hash of the data you want.

    For the Wayback Machine this could be as simple as embedding that hash in the url. That way when someone tries to fetch that url in the future they know what to expect and can verify the website data matches the hash.

    This won’t however work if you don’t already have such hash or you don’t trust the source of it, and I don’t think there’s something that will ever work in those cases.



  • Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

    Most of those companies actually contribute to the kernel or to foundational software used on servers, but few contribute to the userspace for desktop consumers on the level that Valve does.


  • Zig is “c”, but modern and safe.

    Zig is safer than C, but not on a level that is comparable to Rust, so it lacks its biggest selling point. Unfortunately just being a more modern language is not enough to sell it.

    So imagine if trying to fit in a C-like cousin failed

    C++ was not added to Linux because Linus Torvalds thought it was an horrible language, not because it was not possible to integrate in the kernel.









  • But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was.

    IMO that tells more about how the project was organized and names things than the language used.

    So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

    As the other commenter pointed out, there’s Redox. The issue is that this completly disregards an incremental approach: you have to rewrite everything before it comes usable, you can’t do it piece by piece. Currently the approach of Rust for Linux is not even to rewrite things, but to allow writing new drivers in Rust.

    Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.

    Have you seen the conference video? That’s not just refusal to learn a new language, it’s open hostility. And it’s not the only instance, for example Asahi Lina also reported unreasonable behaviour by some maintainers just because she wrote Rust code, even when Rust was not involved.