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

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!

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?

I don’t entirely agree, you can get used to the borrow checker relatively quickly and you mostly stop thinking about it.

What tends to make Rust complex is advanced use of traits, generics, iterators, closures, wrapper types, async, error types… You start getting these massive semi-autogenerated nested types, the syntax sugar starts generating complex logic for you in the background that you cannot see but have to keep in mind.

It’s tempting to use the advanced type system to encode and enforce complex API semantics, using Rust almost like a formal verifier / theorem prover. But things can easily become overwhelming down that rabbit hole.

It's just overengineered. Many Rust folks don't realize it because they come from C++ and suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

How is it overengineered?

That's my personal opinion after I've learned it and read Klabnik's book. I'm aware that other people's mileage differs. I'm listing a few reasons below.

- Overall too complex

- Wrong philosophy: demanding the user to solve problems instead of solving problems for the user

- Trying to provide infinite backwards compatibility with crates, which leads to hidden bitrot

- Slow compilation times

- Claims to be "safe" but allows arbitrary unsafe code, and it's everywhere.

- Adding features to fix misfeatures (e.g. all that lifetime cruft; arc pointers) instead of fixing the underlying problem

- Hiding implementations with leaky abstractions (traits)

- Going at great length to avoid existing solutions so users re-invent it (e.g. OOP with inheritance; GC), or worse, invent more complex paradigms to work around the lack (e.g. some Rust GUI efforts; all those smart pointer types to work around the lack of GC)

- A horrendous convoluted syntax that encourages bad programming style: lot's of unwrap, and_then, etc. that makes programs hard to read and audit.

- Rust's safe code is not safe: "Rust’s safety guarantees do not include a guarantee that destructors will always run. [...] Thus, allowing mem::forget from safe code does not fundamentally change Rust’s safety guarantees."

It already has similar complexity and cognitive demands as C++ and it's going to get worse. IMHO, that's also why it's popular. Programmers love shitty languages that allow them to show off. Boring is good.

> Claims to be "safe" but allows arbitrary unsafe code, and it's everywhere.

Sigh. This is not true. Not the first part, and especially not the last part. `Unsafe` doesn't allow arbitrary, unsafe code. It resets the compiler to a level where most manually managed languages are all the time. You still have to uphold all guarantees the compiler provides, just manually. That's why Miri exists.

Either it's safe or it's unsafe. If you use the keyword "unsafe" it should definitely not mean "safe" (and it doesn't, but you seem to suggest it).

I think you're intentionally misreading everything people are saying to you.

It's really just you and another Rust fan, there's no need to further discuss this among the three of us. I think I've made it extensively clear - based on the above reasons - that I believe it's a horrible programming language and people using it now will regret it in 10 years or so.

You're welcome to read the rustnomicon to learn about the topic you're discussing. Having written C and C++ for almost 15 years and doing extensive embedded work with it, I'm very secure in my decision to use Rust. But I'm capable of doing research to learn about it and to be somewhat involved in the development, mostly as an observer, to see both the direction it's moving and the overall process and meticulousness with which it's developed, to make an informed decision.

It doesn't seem you're making an informed statement at all anywhere in this thread, choosing instead to be hung up on semantics rather than the facts plainly laid out for you.

If that makes me an "enthusiast" then so be it.

Well, if you come from C++ then Rust might look nice to you. But I come from languages like CommonLisp and Ada, and so Rust just looks like a horrible abomination to me because that's what it is. It's also not surprising. A good programming language simply cannot be designed that fast.

Common Lisp is an amalgamation of every lisp they could find, they slammed it all in. Calling it well designed is funny because every single CL developer openly accepts that its a fucking weird language with hell lot of warts that cannot be polished away.

Ada is fine, just verbose, kinda fun, no comments about it except that its kinda sad how weak their formal verification is. I prefer Frama-C over it. You can compare Ada and rust but ada is horrible, sincerely horrible at working with ownership. Frama-C can run laps around it as you can verify EVEN arbitrary pointer arithmetic.

Calling rust a horrible abomination is weird. As someone who dabbled in CL for an year, I love the fact that it has proc macros and even tho its harder to use it, i can make my own DSLs and make buildtime compilers!!

That opens up a world of possibilities.We can actually have safer and stricter math libraries! Maybe put us back in era of non-electron applications?

The horrible part might be syntax but eh, its a stupid thing to care about.