Is It Time to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?

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Bryan Cantrill explores Rust, explains why it has captured the imagination of so many systems software engineers, and outlines where it might best fit in the deep stack of operating system software.

#Rust #OperatingSystems #SystemProgramming #InfoQ #QConSanFrancisco

[ArchimedesTrajano]

I feel like I am watching a stand up comedian, but with topics I like to listen too.

[thzzzt]

I'm gonna write my mom's traditional chocolate oatmeal cookie recipe in Rust.

[zonico]

This guy has more stories to tell than all of my great grandfathers combined

[kjrimple]

I absolutely love his style. Kind of like the edge of manic but enthusiastic and experienced all in one. And he’s hilarious.

[kgsphinx]

After listening to the WHOLE thing, I highly recommend it. The long winded OS history lesson is actually helpful and foundational to his conclusions. So, not a waste of time unless you know everything already, which is unlikely.

Also, it was great to hear that his experience with Rust's borrow checker were exactly the same as mine.. ("wait, I think you want this mutable.. oh, now this should be a reference.. oh, wait, that's totally wrong"), and that he understands why it's all so important. You can't ask for a better proponent of Rust.

[davel]

Not only was Taligent a portmanteau of Talent and Intelligent, but it was Talent with out the NT (as in Windows NT) and Intelligent without the Intel (as in x86)

[CrustyAbsconder]

As long as we can play FreeCell and Pinball in Redox OS someday ( or some other Rust-based OS ), I can finally ditch Windows 95 as my daily driver.

[ThePandaGuitar]

This guy’s passion is contagious. Love it!

[CyberGizmo]

A few of corrections, Burroughs B5000 MCP was written in Algol-60 second they are still in business after merging with Sperry to form UNISYS, and 3 MCP was not an executive it was an operating system

[sebastianwiesendahl]

49:12 finally starts talking about Operating Systems in Rust

[clumsyjester]

Philipp Oppermann's Blog OS -> PHOBOS
Obviously, duh.

[batlin]

This is the most entertaining and informative talk I've seen in possibly ever. The use of Multics and Unix to illustrate the extremes of both waterfall and ad hoc agile development is pretty mind blowing!

[efraimdeluxe]

"C++ dragged all of my shit into the street and lit it on fire" .. i know the feels, man xD

[pkos]

If anyone wants a much more in depth look into how Unix was ported to the PDP-11, Tom Lyons was featured on the podcast "On The Metal" a few months ago. He was one of the main people who ported it iirc!

[bigtallpaul]

Came for the Rust, stayed for the history. Brilliant.

[CarloMilanesi]

C *has* a logical XOR operator; it is "!=". For example if I want to check if "a" is greater than 6 or if "b" is grater than 6 but not both, I can write: a > 6 != b > 6. Of course, there is no possibility of short-circuit evaluation, as the value of one operator of XOR is never enough to determine the value of the whole operation.

[GaryvanderMerwe]

The hybrid approach is what Mozilla is doing with Firefox. It seems to be working well.

[Dygear]

Rust has a really good use case in the SoC that has unified memory. macOS on ARM for example would have a much easier time as there are not two memory pools that they have to talk to. It's really just passing pointers around. "CPU: Hey GPU, your memory is here. Go play with it."

[sundhaug]

22:05 The Macintosh was mostly in m68k assembly (at least to start), Pascal was used sparingly and more of a Lisa-thing

[SimonClarkstone]

The way he describes people fighting the borrow checker but it being worth the effort is rather like what I've heard about the Haskell type checker that forces you to think harder about your program when you're writing it in return for being more likely to run correctly once written.