The good news is Linux now adopt Rust. In the end it will be all Rust although it may take a long time to migrate from C.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45125116

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Your example code is not because it is faster to write, it is because it is impossible for its to overflow on that line.

Rust is one of the language I enjoy to use. The problem is you need to overcome its steep learning curve in order to enjoy it, which people tend to give up because it is too hard.

The problem with this is if you have a team working on a C++ product you will need some people who can catch memory bugs to review every code before merging. Even with this approach it still possible to missed some memory bugs since the reviewer need to fully understand each object lifetime, which is time consuming during code review.

I'm working on a company that run on a server application written in C/C++. The code base is very large and we always have memory bugs that required ASAN on production to fix the bugs. We have started migrating each part to Rust one year ago and we never have a single crash from Rust code. The reason we choose Rust is because it is a server application that computation intensive, latency sensitive and large amount of active connections.

Try keep using Rust until you comfortable with it and you will like it. It fit with your simple mental model. I can say this because I was a C++ users for the whole life and switched to Rust recently.

The major problem for me with Rust is deadlock. In Rust it is very easy to cause a deadlock compared to other languages. In other languages you need to think a lot before locking a mutex but in Rust you just `foo.lock().unwrap()`, which can easily cause a deadlock if you have multiple mutexes and someone in your team does not aware the lock order.

Most C++ developers may don't understand what I mean. You need to proficient in Rust in order to understand it. When I was still using C++ as my primary language I have the same feeling as the other C++ developers about Rust. Once you start to comfortable with Rust you will see it is superior than C++ and you don't want to use C++ anymore.

One of the reason is you get the whole program optimization automatically in Rust while C/C++ you need to use put the function that need to be inline in the header or enable LTO at the link time. Bound checking in Rust that people keep using as an example for performance problem is not actually a problem. For example, if you need to access the same index multiple times Rust will perform bound-checking only on the first access (e.g. https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=release&edit...).

Borrow checker is your friend, not an enemy once you know how work with it.

1. You need a programming language that capable of output the machine code for your target CPU. Better to be a language that does not have GC or runtime like Rust/C++/C/Zig. If you are not familiar with low-level language I recommend C as a first step since it is easy to find examples on the internet.

2. Learn the basic of assembly language of your target CPU. You need this because the above language may not provide the intrinsic functions for some instructions.

3. Start writing a hello world kernel. You can find a bunch of tutorial on the internet, especially for x86.

4. With step 3 you should already learned how the CPU start your kernel and how many mode and privilege level available on the CPU. Usually the CPU will give you the highest privilege level when jumping into your code.

5. Now you need to setup the CPU into whatever you want. For example, you likely need to switch the CPU to long mode on x86 so you can use 64-bits instructions. In this step you likely need to setup a virtual memory. You can find a reference for your CPU from their website.

6. If you have reached this step then congratulations! You should already have some idea how the CPU is working with the OS and how to enumerate available devices to discover its memory location. There are a ton of works that need to be done once you are here like implementing filesystem, scheduler, etc.

Remember that the only different between the software that run on the OS and the OS kernel is mode of the CPU currently executing its code. With highest privilege level you can use some instructions that are not available to the normal application.

Now we know how the console run the game. The next step is how to use this information run the game outside the console. The good news is PS4 system is just a modified version of FreeBSD, which mean how it works is very similar to the PC. A PS4 executable is just a custom ELF file. So to run a PS4 game outside the console we need to manually map the game executable and provide the symbol it needed somehow (e.g. a custom implementation or reuse the PS4 library).