The long-term goal is for Rust to overtake C in the kernel (from what I understand

Your understanding wrong. Rust is limited to some very specific niches within the kernel and will likely not spread out anytime soon.

critical code gets left untouched (a lot of the time) because no one wants to be the one that breaks shit

The entire kernel is “critical”. The entire kernel runs - kind of by definition - in kernel space. Every bug there has the potential for privilege escalation or faults - theoretically even hardware damage. So following your advice, nobody should every touch the kernel at all.

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it’s not perfect, it’s one of the better uses of my tax euros.

Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it’s running or being used every day.

That’s in no way what’s been proposed. Rust is used in a very well defined niche, nobody wants to get rid of C.

But it’s just that sentiment that got us here, you’re arguing against a non-existent threat, and thus reject the whole proposal.

And it’s a bad argument anyway. You’re only good at memory management until the first bug takes down production.

Rust isn’t a panacea and certainly has problems, but eliminating an entire class of potentially very dangerous bugs is a very good argument.

No, I’d argue you simply didn’t want to invest in the other tools.

Think about it, you probably spent hours on customizing and automating vim, and then say you’re faster in that. Well, that’s called a habit.

IDE are objectively more powerful and since you can actually see options and navigate quickly, you don’t need to memorize every obscure feature.

All the terminal editor enthusiasts are actively holding us back, because they insist everything outside vim is garbage for enterprise and kiddies.

If your tool of choice is actively hostile to new users for no reason other than “that’s how it’s always been, and thus it’s better”, well then you’re digging a moat to automate your gatekeeping.

I understand it very well. And that’s exactly why I’m writing this.

Ok, I can see you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Then say, grandmaster delusion, what purpose does vim serve, where it is actually the best tool? Writing code? Hardly, it’s way too limited and requires a ton of upfront investment and headspace. Writing config files? Hardly, because if you write these by hand, you’re living in the 90s, that’s what Ansible, Terraform etc are for.

You just don’t want to admit, that vim is nothing more than a habit. Muscle memory.

You’re using the terminal, because you’re used to it. It is not the better tool, it’s simply what you happen to know already.

People who argue with productivity because of some key bindings live in the world of the 80s. You don’t just sit there and type code 12h a day, that’s not how modern software development works.

And all those blockheads down voting me are caught up in their weird superiority complex. They are the powerful superhackers, and don’t understand that we are just highly qualified plumbers.

…so your infrastructure is outdated.

And how often does that happen in the real world?

VIM may have been a very useful tool 20 or 30 years ago, but today it’s nothing else but a tool for one’s sense of superiority. It’s the vinyl of editors.

If you have to type that much code in a terminal, your infrastructure is outdated. Simple as that.

And that’s especially true for Linux and other big projects.

I’m not a kernel or C developer by any stretch, but a few years ago fixed a small bug that caused my knockoff PS2 controllers to act super weird. Nothing serious, something like one constant and maybe 5 lines of code. Would have gladly pushed that upstream, but fuck me sideways is that a complicated process. Patches via email??? And the argument is always “but it works for us”, yeah burning witches and slavery also work for some people, doesn’t mean it’s something to continue doing.

If there isn’t a serious revamp, Linux will die a slow death or become just a corporate graveyard product like Cobol.

Actually, the Pico is also an arm device, just the M0 variant which admittedly barely counts as a computer.

I did this with my sensors running in Pi picos.

There was some wonkyness with some of the electrical stuff and since I have no idea how to debug that, I just restarted them every 24 hours and at start “drained” all pins by repeatedly reading from them.

I’m reasonably sure, this setup is cursed enough to kill an electrical engineer on sight, but it kind of works good-ish enough.

Microcontrollers aren’t “the whole board”, following that definition, an SoC wouldn’t have a CPU either.

MCs require support components. Clocks, power converters, level shifters, modem, etc. You’ll hardly wire a barrel plug and a servo directly to a DIP (though that would be pretty cool).

I had 4 Dells in the last 4 years. Two different models, each one required one RMA, and both are absolute garbage. Granted, they’re workstations and not ultrabooks, but those things need thrust reversers so the fans don’t blow them off the desk, they run extremely hot and have countless stupid bugs. For example USB devices sometimes not working after suspension. Or randomly turning on and getting hot for no reason.

And these fuckers have more coil whine than anything I’ve ever experienced.

My old ThinkPad (which had almost the same components as the first Dell) didn’t have any of these problems.

I don’t like Dell.

Those are still CPUs. Microcontrollers have CPUs, and those are the smallest units that can actually run code in a meaningful way.

However, Linux needs an MMU as far as I know, so you won’t see Ubuntu boot on an esp32, even though it does have a CPU.

Sure it can be done, but no corporation in the world will do that and the extremely large population of people who simply don’t care all that much about computers (and I don’t mean that as an insult) won’t do it either.

So effectively, a whole bunch of machines will get scrapped or their users won’t get any updates. And knowing MS’ history, they’ll probably scare people into buying a new PC via pop-ups every week.

ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.

ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don’t stand in your way softwarewise, which isn’t always true for Dell or HP machines.

But they should. Or at least comparable.

Think about the difference between Reddit and Lemmy. They both offer similar functionality, but Reddit will set your phone on fire if it gets the chance.

The same is true for YouTube. Browsing YouTube is scrolling through an image gallery, only video playback should be a problem. Yet, it will consume more resources than a well equipped laptop had when YouTube was launched. That’s insane.

We’re moving in a direction where computers get faster and faster, but for the last 10 years or so, the actual utility of the system as a whole stagnated. Besides games, what can a modern computer do, that a 2014 model couldn’t?

Yeah, you want to sniff nix first before you mainline nixos.