One thing I like about C as a systems programming language is that it is easy for every other language to bind to it. I’m fine with C++ if the external interface is extern “C”, but that is often not the case. I don’t know how easy it is for other languages to bind to Rust. It would be nice if a language could automatically generate Swig definition files or something similar. However one is going to run into language semantics and impedance mismatches with richer languages. The simplicity of “C” makes a nice bind target. Although I have yet to see a thorough binding to Win32, so I suspect the preprocessor makes this difficult.
Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
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Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#12One thing I like about C as a systems programming language is that it is easy for every other language to bind to it. I’m fine with C++ if the external interface is extern “C”, but that is often not the case. I don’t know how easy it is for other languages to bind to Rust. It would be nice if a language could automatically generate Swig definition files or something similar. However one is going to run into language…
Check out TerraFX[1], created and maintained by Tanner Gooding, owner of System.Numerics in .NET Core. He uses another project he maintains called ClangSharp[2] to scan Windows SDK header files and generate blittable, marshalling-free C# bindings. There are many things in C header files that are not easily bound, such as macros; we do a lot of manual or partially-automated work to account for those.
TerraFX is greater than just Windows bindings[3] but it is certainly useful for even just that. I've contributed a lot of bindings recently for some low-level Windows headers. Contributions are welcome!
[1] https://github.com/terrafx/terrafx
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#13Defination of systems programming language is really contradicting. Go was sold as systems programming language in beginning.
Kubernetes is written in Go; I would consider that a "systems" project. I think of "systems" as "software whose purpose is to underpin other software", excluding same-language libraries and frameworks. This rough definition does a good job of covering most of the things people mean when they say "systems programming".
Kubernetes is an application that manages virtual machine configurations. While it's a system in the sense of a collection of parts that work together, it is not a system in the sense of the original meaning of systems programming.
That tended to mean a language designed to compile down to processor instruction sets the way C, C++, or now, Rust do.
Go was intended to replace C++ and C for many of the things that Google programmers did, but it wasn't intended to aim at "bare metal" if I recall Rob Pike's design talks correctly.
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kubernetes is written in Go; I would consider that a "systems" project. I think of "systems" as "software whose purpose is to underpin other software", excluding same-language libraries and frameworks. This rough definition does a good job of covering most of the things people mean when they say "systems programming".
Kubernetes is an application that manages virtual machine configurations. While it's a system in the sense of a collection of parts that work together, it is not a system in the sense of the original meaning of systems programming. That tended to mean a language designed to compile down to processor instruction sets the way C, C++, or now, Rust do. Go was intended to replace C++ and C for many of the things that Goog…
That's not a systems language, that's a native language. There's a lot of overlap but they're unrelated concepts. Also, Go does compile to native processor code.
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#15Good intro to the benefits of Rust for a broad audience, but one important omission: the Use-After-Free and Double-Free protection he mentioned is provided by compile-time static analysis, but Rust also does runtime bounds checks to prevent classic stack smashing (with minimal performance overhead). That may not seem like a big deal for the x86_64 world where modern mitigations largely make shellcode a thing of the p…
Just to add to that: Integer overflows in release builds can be turned on, and even when they are off, at very least they are not UBs. More info in http://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/myths-and-legends-about-....
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#16He mentions this book as “the book” on Rust. https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Programming-Language-Steve-Klabn... I think it’s also available for free online. Here? https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
Yep. Although in my opinion Programming Rust [0] is better even though dated. The word goes that the 2nd edition will be out by the end of the year. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Rust-Fast-Systems-Develop...
I read v1 of The Book and then Programming Rust, and I found the latter to be better suited to the way I absorb things.
Both are great and I still refer to The Book (and Programming Rust) from time to time.
I'd be really keen to pick up v2 of Programming Rust.
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#17Good intro to the benefits of Rust for a broad audience, but one important omission: the Use-After-Free and Double-Free protection he mentioned is provided by compile-time static analysis, but Rust also does runtime bounds checks to prevent classic stack smashing (with minimal performance overhead). That may not seem like a big deal for the x86_64 world where modern mitigations largely make shellcode a thing of the p…
Just to add to that: Integer overflows in release builds can be turned on, and even when they are off, at very least they are not UBs. More info in http://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/myths-and-legends-about-... .
Thanks for pointing that out and linking through to a great resource!
Re: Microsoft's Safe Systems Programming Languages Effort (Rust)
#18Defination of systems programming language is really contradicting. Go was sold as systems programming language in beginning.
go is not system programming language because they have GC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)
Every now and then this misconception is found on HN.