Google does basically the same with Android. It’s the standard way of locking you into a free “open” standard platform.
Definitely annoying but IMO the trade-off is worth it. Would you rather VSCode didn’t exist at all? Because that’s the alternative.
It is hard, but what’s the alternative? Does Linux want to be comically insecure forever?
I know Linus doesn’t really care about security so it’s kind of surprising that he is on board with Rust!
I’m pretty sure Lisp and Forth are simpler than C.
He did call it a “shiny language of the day”. That’s criticism. He’s saying the popularity of Rust is due to temporary hype rather than because it is intrinsically good.
C is simpler in the way that a motorbike is simpler than a car. Simplicity isn’t the only criterion or we would write everything in assembly which is really simple.
it is wise to stick with old and tested.
You mean old and known to cause endless security vulnerabilities.
His point could be valid, if C was working fine and Rust didn’t fix it. But C isn’t working fine and Rust is the first actual solution we’ve ever had.
He’s just an old man saying we can’t have cars on the road because they’ll scare the horses.
holster design coming soon!
lol
Steal glances from nerds and other losers who would be interested in a mini laptop
lol I hope this is a joke!
His comment should be read as “I don’t get the borrow checker”.
That’s not what he wrote.
It’s not because people are sensitive, it’s because Rust gets a lot of dumb criticism and people are tired of it.
I agree. Maybe Rust should make crates automatically re-export dependencies if any of that dependency’s types are publicly exposed.
Small nit:
CHERI is even weirder. CHERI pointers store 128-bit capabilities in addition to the 64-bit address we’re used to
The 128-bit capability (actually 129 since there’s a tag bit) includes the address. It’s 64-bit address + 64-bit metadata + 1-bit tag = 129-bit capability.
Before virtual memory was a thing, almost all memory was accessible.
Virtual memory has nothing to do with whether 0 is a valid address. You can have a CPU where it is valid, or one where it isn’t and you’ll get an access fault if you try to access it. You can also have virtual memory where page 0 is mappable, or not.
I think the author knew that, based on the later points so it’s probably just bad wording. Interesting point about wasm too!
But don’t you loose polymorphism?
No. You’ll have to be more specific about what kind of polymorphism you mean (it’s an overloaded term), but you can have type unions, like int | str.
Your points 1-3 are handled by running the code and reading the error messages, if any
Not unless you have ridiculously exhaustive tests, which you definitely don’t. And running tests is still slower than your editor telling you of your mistake immediately.
I probably didn’t explain 4-6 well enough if you haven’t actually ever used static types.
They make it easier to navigate because your IDE now understands your code and you can do things like “find all references”, and “go to definition”. With static types you can e.g. ctrl-click on mystruct.myfield and it will go straight to the definition of myfield.
They make the code easier to understand because knowing the types of variables tells you a lot of information about what they are and how to use them. You’ll often see in untyped code people add comments saying what type things are anyway.
Refactoring is easier because your IDE understands your code, so you can do things like renaming variables and moving code and it will update all the things it needs to correctly. Refactoring is also one of those areas where it tends to catch a lot of mistakes. E.g. if you change the type of something or the parameters of a function, it’s very easily to miss one place where it was used.
I don’t think “you need to learn it” really counts as slowing down development. It’s not that hard anyway.
I can understand the appeal for enterprise code but that kind of project seems doomed to go against the Zen of Python anyways, so it’s probably not the best language for that.
It’s probably best not to use Python for anything, but here we are.
I will grant that data science is probably one of the very few areas where you may not want to bother, since I would imagine most of your code is run exactly once. So that might explain why you don’t see it as worthwhile. For code that is long-lived it is very very obviously worth it.
Just in case that’s a genuine question, the reasons people like static types are:
Often people say it slows development down but it’s actually the opposite. Especially for large projects or ones involving multiple people.
The only downside really is that sometimes the types can get more complicated than they’re worth, but in that case you have an escape hatch via the Any type.
Pyright is very good. The rest are worthless though.
How powerful do you want it? Python’s type system is actually pretty good already and relatively sound when checked with Pyright (not Mypy though).
It’s not Typescript-level, but it’s better than e.g. Java or C++.
The main problem is Python developers writing code that can’t be statically type checked. E.g. using magically generate method names via __dict__ or whatever (I think lxml does that).
Pff it’s not like Linux has perfect WiFi either. I set my WiFi to auto connect to a VPN, and then delete the VPN later. That caused WiFi to always fail with no error messages except some incomprehensible deauth message in dmesg! Good luck figuring that out.
This totally might be true, but the fact that he got as far as measuring the same latency on X and Wayland… and then just gave up and is like “well never mind what the measurements say, it’s definitely Wayland”… Hmm.
You gotta do the measurements. It’s probably not even that hard, all you need is a USB mouse emulator (any microcontroller with USB peripheral support can do this and there are tons of examples) and a photodiode.
You don’t even need to worry about display latency if you are just comparing X with Wayland.
Obviously Codium also wouldn’t exist without VSCode.