- cross-posted to:
- showoff@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- showoff@programming.dev
This isn’t Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn’t quite fully working yet.
Has anyone used this before? What was your experience with it?
Note: If this is inappropriate since this isn’t technically Linux, mods please take down.
From my personal experience I can tell you 2 reasons. The first is that this is the first general purpose language that can be used for all projects. You can use it on the web browser with web assembly, it is good for backend and it also is low level enough to use it for OS development and embedded. Other languages are good only for some thing and really bad for others. The second reason is that it is designed around catching errors at compile time. The error handling and strict typing forces the developer to handle errors. I have to spend more time creating the program but considerably less time finding and fixing bugs.
As much as I want to love Rust, that’s not entirely true.
Writing a web API in Rust is a pain. It requires way too much boilerplate for very low level concepts. For example having to deal with all the lifetime crap in a simple CRUD endpoint. I understand why that’s necessary, but compared to Python or Java it’s just a very large mental load overhead.
You need less and less lifetimes as time goes on. The compiler gets better at inferring them and you could always use the heap if you wanted to or if what you are doing isn’t very low level.