Ephera

Oh, it said “By ~2026, it will be 100% compliant”, which seems to just be an estimate based on the trend for how many tests they passed over the past years. My bad.

But yeah, probably still useful to get it onto real systems now to find any other remaining bugs.

Yeah, which is why pairing works so well. Suddenly, you’ve got two people who were there when it was created and might know why certain design decisions were made.

Which is why making code readable is so very important. Our juniors and students will think we’re ridiculous, when we spend a long time cleaning up some code or choosing the least misunderstandable name for a type. But you fuck that up and then others, as well as your future self, will be wasting many more minutes misunderstanding what your code does.

Spamming comments is rather controversial, especially in high-level languages. Problem is, they only show up in one place, so they’re just not very useful, but also have a high chance of becoming inaccurate over time. In particular when you spam them to explain relatively trivial stuff, people will stop reading them, meaning they won’t update them.

The ‘what’ can be documented with meaningful variable/function names, log/error/assert messages and perhaps most importantly unit/integration tests (which should be understood like a specification that checks automatically that it’s applied correctly).

Comments are indispensible for explaining the ‘why’, though, whenever that is not obvious.

Heard just this week that uutils apparently has 100% compatibility with the GNU coreutils (so more than musl aims for). That’s good, if distros start shipping it then. It’s not really something normal users would install themselves…

It is kind of cool, when you’ve actually written your own software and use that. But realistically, I’m still getting the compiler from the internet…

And for a really rather Minecraft-like experience, you can install VoxeLibre in Luanti.

Yesterday, we had a presentation at $DAYJOB, where we showed off our software project at a high level to another department. That department does lots of low-level work, including with C.

A team lead from that department, who knows our project, had provided the initial draft for the presentation slides. And they threw a sentence at the end of the slides “By the way: $PROJECT powered by Rust”. We were also not the only project there, which explicitly mentioned Rust, even though it wasn’t strictly relevant.

And yeah, that’s just kind of insane to me. When even management understands that their techies get excited about working with Rust, that’s not anymore just a few select voices that call for it. That’s a whole department discontent with C, where an alternative is presented.

Which is why I would be extremely surprised, if not something similar happened with the Linux kernel.
Obviously, those who’ve coded C for twenty years might not understand the issue, but there’s so many people for which low-level development becomes accessible for the first time with Rust. The stream of people wanting to contribute Rust code will just not cut off any time soon.

This meme made sense in 2012, not when the Republican Party has decided to be the Anti-Democratic Party.

Good thing that this isn’t actually possible…