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Asterinas: OS kernel written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI

(github.com)
364 points Klasiaster | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 12:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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akira2501 ◴[15 Oct 24 18:58 UTC] No.41851912[source]▶
I personally dislike rust, but I love kernels, and so I'll always check these projects out.

This is one of the nicer ones.

It looks pretty conservative in it's use of Rust's advanced features. The code looks pretty easy to read and follow. There's actually a decent amount of comments (for rust code).

Not bad!

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wg0 ◴[16 Oct 24 03:40 UTC] No.41855386[source]▶
Otherwise is a decent language but what makes it difficult is the borrow semantics and lifetimes. Lifetimes are more complicated to get your head around.

But then there's this Arc, Ref, Pinning and what not - how deep is that rabbit hole?

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KingOfCoders ◴[16 Oct 24 05:51 UTC] No.41855995[source]▶
I always feel Arc is the admission that the borrow checker with different/overlapping lifetimes is too difficult, despite what many Rust developers - who liberally use Arc - claim.
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lmm ◴[16 Oct 24 11:24 UTC] No.41857856[source]▶
If tracking lifetimes is simple 90% of the time and complex 10% of the time, maybe a tool that lets you have them automatically managed (with some runtime overhead) that 10% of the time is the right way forward.
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tracker1 ◴[16 Oct 24 12:46 UTC] No.41858439[source]▶
Then you can use a language and runtime like C# or Java. Or you can use patterns like Go promotes.

There are lots of options if you want.

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lmm ◴[17 Oct 24 01:29 UTC] No.41865586[source]▶
> Then you can use a language and runtime like C# or Java. Or you can use patterns like Go promotes.

But in that case you're stuck paying the overhead 100% of the time, even though 90% of the lifetimes are simple. (Perhaps a little less so with escape analysis etc., but doing it at compile time in a way that's understandable in the source feels a lot more reliable)

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1. neonsunset ◴[17 Oct 24 03:10 UTC] No.41866076[source]▶
Java and C# are languages of different class. C# is perfectly capable of systems programming and manual memory management that is at least more convenient than C (but not C++ with move semantics and operator overloading abuse, otoh C#'s type system and build process are saner which at least partially pays for this).