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Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

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Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#91
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slides don't really add much detail. They're just a light introduction to the sort of region-based memory management that was already being used by Cyclone, well before the Rust project was even a thing.

The video explains more: - Need to keep old insecure code around, too much money to rewrite the world from scratch in Rust, C#, or whatever safe language makes your day - They are just starting the project, so far only interpreter and runtime model - It is based on CHERI CPU research ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ ), which has memory tagging - They are planning to open source the existing w…

Rewriting can be greatly automated. C2Rust[1] proves that. Just can be improved with new languages and refactoring capabilities.

[1] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” I try to be objective as much as possible, but having witnessed almost all of Microsoft’s behavior through history, we have been fooled 100s if not 1000s of times. How many times do you let the fox back into the hen house? The only thing I think when I read recent “Microsoft is so great” comments is that the person is either too young to have any real knowledge…

Big companies are not autonomous and do not make their own decisions, individual people working at those companies do. I think it’s safe to say that anyone working there today has nothing to do with the time periods you’re referencing, so I don’t know why you would consider decades old issues to be relevant today.

There was a medium post about Microsoft's culture and their inability to move on past Gates and Balmer about 6 weeks ago [1]. According to that article you are objectively wrong in saying "it’s safe to say that anyone working there today has nothing to do with the time periods you’re referencing". The article claims that the majority of the power within Microsoft still lays precisely in the hands of people who worked for the company during the times referenced.

1. https://onezero.medium.com/speaking-truth-to-power-reflectio...

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#93
post #42
post #22

For the hating Microsoft crowd, here are the projects where they are also using Rust, https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/?s=rust And the talks done about the internal adoption, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCB19DRw_60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o01QmYVluSw And the author from C++/WinRT is now working on Rust/WinRT. https://kennykerr.ca/2019/11/05/rust/ So lets wait a bit before going to the castle with the pitch…

As a big proponent of F# it annoys me how much one still needs to fight "but M$" arguments if I point out a thing that F# does well. The same thing seems to happen when discussing Haskell with people who know just enough to recognise the influence MSR employees have on it. It almost makes me wonder how they/we can work around that sentiment now. Either hope for generational shift to eventually kill it, or perhaps hav…

Why F# was needed in the first place? OCaml[1] is vastly superior, and doesn't require .NET since can be compiled into the native code. Just in the need of the better Windows platform support. And they add more features with time than F# devs.

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#94
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” I try to be objective as much as possible, but having witnessed almost all of Microsoft’s behavior through history, we have been fooled 100s if not 1000s of times. How many times do you let the fox back into the hen house? The only thing I think when I read recent “Microsoft is so great” comments is that the person is either too young to have any real knowledge…

All those people who worked at Microsoft in the 90's and 2000's now work for at hundreds of other companies throughout the industry. And a whole bunch of people who weren't even born in those times now work for Microsoft. I don't think your opinion is objective at all. It's based on treating a collective as a single mind.

Collectives and companies can keep the same culture and habits even if all people who worked there left. Because people come and leave not in the one go - they do it gradually, so every new employee is "indoctrinated" into the company culture, then indoctrinating new people themselves, even if their mentors left.

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#96
post #93
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a big proponent of F# it annoys me how much one still needs to fight "but M$" arguments if I point out a thing that F# does well. The same thing seems to happen when discussing Haskell with people who know just enough to recognise the influence MSR employees have on it. It almost makes me wonder how they/we can work around that sentiment now. Either hope for generational shift to eventually kill it, or perhaps hav…

Why F# was needed in the first place? OCaml[1] is vastly superior, and doesn't require .NET since can be compiled into the native code. Just in the need of the better Windows platform support. And they add more features with time than F# devs.

I can add F# projects to existing solutions and use F# in some places, C# in others, and C++ in still others, heck even VB.NET can come by for a drink if I'm feeling shameless and not needing to keep up appearances.

OCaml cannot do that. I say this as someone who currently is finishing a year of F# study with plans to study Rust in 2020 and OCaml in 2021.

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#97
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a big proponent of F# it annoys me how much one still needs to fight "but M$" arguments if I point out a thing that F# does well. The same thing seems to happen when discussing Haskell with people who know just enough to recognise the influence MSR employees have on it. It almost makes me wonder how they/we can work around that sentiment now. Either hope for generational shift to eventually kill it, or perhaps hav…

My only beef right now with Microsoft is their insistence on having creepy telemetry in everything. As someone _very_ interested in F#, I encountered this recently with both Visual Studio Code and .NET Core. https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093

You can always switch to the original - the OCaml language.

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#98
post #43

I'm curious to see what Microsoft does. The big breakthrough with Rust was ownership, and Microsoft seems to agree on that. Rust has a lot of other baggage that could be dispensed with. Of course, Microsoft has their own baggage.

I disagree about ownership being the big break through, I’d argue it’s the concept of multiple aliasing and handling that at the syntactic level through the borrow checker that leads to all the safety guarantees of Rust.

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#99
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why F# was needed in the first place? OCaml[1] is vastly superior, and doesn't require .NET since can be compiled into the native code. Just in the need of the better Windows platform support. And they add more features with time than F# devs.

I can add F# projects to existing solutions and use F# in some places, C# in others, and C++ in still others, heck even VB.NET can come by for a drink if I'm feeling shameless and not needing to keep up appearances. OCaml cannot do that. I say this as someone who currently is finishing a year of F# study with plans to study Rust in 2020 and OCaml in 2021.

OCaml has FFI, so C++ is not a problem. .NET is trickier, but can be integrated through RPC or another kinds of remote communication

Re: Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

#100
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given their past years of behavior and focus on dev tools, what in the world makes you think that would be the case? They ported their chromium browser to every platform from day 1.

Two words: Steve Ballmer.

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