Personally, I think a possible angle of attack for a new practical social network protocol is data management, as the amount of data people generate, consume, store, and share is enormous these days. More like, manage data conveniently, and share them easily as a side-effect.

There’s hardly any room remained for LLM.

A reliably attestable system has to nail the entire boot chain: BIOS/firmware, bootloader, kernel/initramfs pairs, the `init` process, and the system configuration. Flip a single bit anywhere along the process, and your equipment is now a brick.

Getting all of this right requires deep system knowledge, plus a lot of hair-pulling adjustment, assuming if you still have hair left.

I think this part of Linux has been underrated. TPM is a powerful platform that is universally available, and Linux is the perfect OS to fully utilize it. The need for trust in digital realm will only increase. Who knows, it may even integrate with cryptocurrency or even social platforms. I really wish them a good luck.

There are other hidden costs coming from usage of std. Even `Result` is a bit of inefficiency.

I'm not saying any of these are bad. I'm just saying Rust would be slower than C if *naively* used.

Practically, that little margin can be removed thru a series of engineering, as both are proper system-level programming languages, which offer tight control over the generated machine code. That is, this whole discussion is basically pointless if we mix in engineering factors.

We better talk about overall engineering costs, and personally I think Rust would not overshoot C easily, mainly due to the limitations that Rust puts on the higher level designs.

Figuring out if that's the best you can get is another story.

That said, we can abuse the same trick for any languages that treats `//` as comment.

List of some practical(?) languages: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, ObjC, D, F#, GLSL/HLSL, Groovy

Personally, among those languages, GLSL sounds most interesting. A single-GLSL graphics demo is always inspiring. (Something like https://www.shadertoy.com/ )

Also, let’s not forget that we can do something similar using block comment(`/* … */`). An example in C:

/*/../usr/bin/env gcc "$0" "$@"; ./a.out; rm -vf a.out; exit; */

#include

int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); return 0; }

I’m quite glad that those talented guys finally escaped from the pit hole of reverse engineering. It maybe fun and interesting, but its future was already capped by Apple. I wish they find another fashion, hopefully something more original and progressive. Stop chasing and push forward.