Ubus (OpenWrt micro bus architecture)

Did they consider using a memory-safe language for this?

I have no idea if they did. C is a "default choice" in embedded systems.

I don't know if we now have a better alternative that is similar in speed, ram use and binary size.

If we do I'd would read a discussion on which one to use with interest.

The project age is good background info. However Rust didn't invent memory-safety, there were reasonable options for system programming at that time too (eg Ocaml, Go, Ada, etc).

edit: Also D in safe mode like mentioend above - not sure if it was around in 2010?

Story time.. I coded a similar thing when I started working after graduation for a DTV software company; we needed to have an IPC on Linux and I whipped up some very crude equivalent of protobuf (which I didn’t know about), based on an RLE lib i stumbled upon and without any form of discovery.

It was circa 2009, I had only been exposed to plain text protocols and didn’t know about json. In hindsight, we might’ve been better using standard dbus, of protobuf, but I was a rookie and it provided the performance we needed (for DTV metadata).

I’m happy to see that these can still thrive, and I just recently figured out that discovery is a net multiplier in these projects; doing this really proved me that any problem is solvable if you can have some time to think about it and can prototype.

I long for these moments now, I feel like nearly all computing issues have been solved and we are now just plumbers, connecting libraries and software modules through config files instead of building things.

There is no real case to be made against the idea of memory safety, but there is a case to be made for C.

You can write C code such that its unit tested, fuzzed, statically analyzed and reviewed, and often embedded code has one or two specific jobs.

I would have loved to see Zig here, as it makes all of the above (testing, analysis, code clarity for review) easier, but its also not memory safe necessarily.

You could write it in D with @safe (which is SafeD or whatever), which is memory safe, but thats not a very popular language.

You could use Ada, but again, thats not as easy to find devs for as C is.

You could use Go or Ocaml, though go isn't really memory safe and you can easily cause data races in goroutines, and ocaml has a runtime afaik so thats out of the question for low memory devices.

You could use Rust, assuming it had existed back when they started it, and you would get memory safety, but also an entire kitchen sink of useless garbage (like C++). Youd also have to shell out to unsafe{} in a lot of places, unless you use a crate for it, which will then do unsafe{} for you.

So chances are, whatever you do, C is a pretty sane choice, or maybe C++ if you want RAII to at least make your resource management and lifetimes easy to handle.

I dont think you deserve to be downvoted, since this is an interesting discussion to have. However, I think it would have been helpful for the discussion if you had outlined which language youd suggest and why.

To Steelman your argument, I would say you think that C is unsafe to such a degree that even a for loop is UB most of the time (integer overflow as UB), no real way to check array bounds, no real way to catch off-by-one and similarly stupid simple errors, use after free, egc. and that the entire ecosystem relies on raw pointers and macros, and its a shitshow. I think your point would have been to suggest Rust, as it fixes all these issues, while bringing along a stronger type system and a better toolchain.