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Edit is now open source

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Edit is now open source

#11

Post by teddyh »

lblume wrote: post #5
QuiCasseRien wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I can see why people don't like to write Rust. It is more tedious, harder because of the ownership model, and has a very steep learning curve. What I don't get is what people have against programs written in Rust from the bottom up. They are safer to use, introduce far fewer vulnerabilities, and you can even locally reason about the code much better than in typical 'unsafe' languages like C++.

The non-stable ABI, forcing all-statically linked binaries, is also a thing.

Re: Edit is now open source

#12

Post by 90s_dev »

Interesting how we always go in circles.

edit.cmd was one of the first programs I ever used.

Now it's back rewritten as a Windows 10+ program in Rust?

Yet it looks and works just the same as 30 years ago!

Re: Edit is now open source

#13

Post by eikenberry »

lblume wrote: post #5
QuiCasseRien wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I can see why people don't like to write Rust. It is more tedious, harder because of the ownership model, and has a very steep learning curve. What I don't get is what people have against programs written in Rust from the bottom up. They are safer to use, introduce far fewer vulnerabilities, and you can even locally reason about the code much better than in typical 'unsafe' languages like C++.

It seems like your first paragraph answers the question in the second. If it is harder to use and learn then that reduces the value of free software released using it as that software is then harder to modify, fix, contribute to, etc. The tradeoff for Rust being hard should be more security and fewer bugs. The additional cost here, and the one that the OP is probably annoyed with, is that it moves away from the languages/platforms that MS has traditionally used and that developers who work on that platform expect.

Re: Edit is now open source

#14

Post by 90s_dev »

lblume wrote: post #5
QuiCasseRien wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I can see why people don't like to write Rust. It is more tedious, harder because of the ownership model, and has a very steep learning curve. What I don't get is what people have against programs written in Rust from the bottom up. They are safer to use, introduce far fewer vulnerabilities, and you can even locally reason about the code much better than in typical 'unsafe' languages like C++.

> and you can even locally reason about the code much better than in typical 'unsafe' languages like C++.

Do you have an example of this? I'm just a TypeScript guy who never had a fair chance to use C++ or Rust for long, so I'd be curious how what you say is true.

Re: Edit is now open source

#15

Post by sedatk »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Edit for DOS was my favorite editor. All the keys worked as you expect. You could select text with shift. It had find and a replace. That’s a lot more than most editors give you without config fiddling and arcane key commands. Those simple things get almost everything I need for operating system maintenance. Edit was the pure distilled essence of an editor. It was a work of art really.

It was okay when it came out because the alternative was EDLIN (DOS version of ed). But IIRC, it had a 64KB file size limitation which was a problem.

Re: Edit is now open source

#16

Post by tadfisher »

trinix912 wrote: post #10

I wonder what prevented them from porting the ms-dos EDIT.COM to 64bit Windows back then. There's still EDLIN.COM in the 32bit version.

They canceled the 64-bit port of NTVDM (virtual DOS machine), which is what handles all those INT 21h syscalls from DOS applications. Without that, there's honestly not much to port, and it's easier to just make a new NT-native CLI app.

Re: Edit is now open source

#17

Post by computatrum »

It not only written in Rust, but they avoid basically any dependencies to third-party crates (beside the obligatory windows-sys/libc), optimizing probably for binary size. To achieve this, they seem to re-implement considerable parts of the rust ecosystem (own TUI library implementation, own unicode handling, own arena implementation, ...).

Re: Edit is now open source

#19

Post by tadfisher »

teddyh wrote: post #11
lblume wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why people don't like to write Rust. It is more tedious, harder because of the ownership model, and has a very steep learning curve. What I don't get is what people have against programs written in Rust from the bottom up. They are safer to use, introduce far fewer vulnerabilities, and you can even locally reason about the code much better than in typical 'unsafe' languages like C++.

The non-stable ABI, forcing all-statically linked binaries, is also a thing.

Which has next to zero impact on Windows applications, which ship their own DLLs anyway (besides stuff like DirectX).
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