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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I finally watched the talk today and that wasn’t what I thought he meant. What I thought he was getting at was that the rust parts of the kernel interact with lots of other modules written by people who don’t know rust. When those C modules change their semantics in ways that break the rust code, they can’t go fix it because they don’t know rust. In fact, whenever they make a change, they don’t even know if they broke some rust module, because they don’t understand the rust code well enough. And this is something that everyone is going to have to live with for the foreseeable future, because you can’t force all those other kernel hackers to learn rust.



  • I haven’t seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

    IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don’t use it as intended. I think they’re mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

    Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach’s performance issues, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

    And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.





  • There are companies working on providing that experience for Linux. System76 is one. You can buy a laptop with their is pre installed. Everything works, including suspend. If something breaks, you call the support number or email and they either talk you through fixing it or sending it in for repair or replacement. It’s not that different from having a Dell or HP.







  • I had a similar experience. Back before epub took off, I started reading Gutenberg books on my wince phone. I think I was using an app called jbookshelf. Even then I loved the convenience of it.

    Once android happened, I switched to epubs and it was so much better.

    Now I’m mostly using koreader, along with kindle and Google play books. I prefer reading anything in a foreign language on Kindle, because it’s so easy to look up words.