Selectable Platform Support Proposed Again For Intel's DRM Driver

[caligula]

not all mistakes are the same. there are indeed "dumb" mistakes you want to avoid from the get go especially if it could compromise the security / well being of others. Or would you like your surgeon to operate at the wrong end, because it was decided to remove the patient-checklist to enable more "educational mistakes" again?
Mistakes are good for students and such while in education. Mistakes can be bad when you are working on serious stuff.

At the same time, dynamic languages such as JavaScript are becoming more common everywhere. People hate compilers because they always complain about buggy code. Dynamic languages are better because you can spew millions of lines of code, even syntactically broken code. If the script interpreter picks then branch (if-then-else) instead of the else branch, the latter could even contain raw binary data without the parser noticing anything. The problems are revealed as late as possible, maybe in production. This saves a lot of money and developer time. Compilers (incremental in IDEs) catch problems maybe in less than a second after typing the code. This is constantly slowing down the developers. Many also disable syntax highlighting because it reveals syntax errors, e.g. XML without a matching closing tag. This early noticing of problems ruins the productivity.

[OneTimeShot]

Re: $LanguageOfTheMoment

There is no doubt that C has issues, but there has never been an accepted replacement. Everyone dumps on Java. C# is Microsoft. C++ maybe if they ever stop adding stuff. Then there are all of those hip languages Ruby, PHP, Go, Ceylon, etc that basically are 10 a penny.

Rust - who knows? We've seen loads of these languages come and go. My money is on Rust being dead in a couple of years...

In any case, IMO the real issue is in the surrounding libraries. libc is really obsolete. Java libraries and .NET are pretty decent. That's where we should be concentrating attention.

[starshipeleven]

Then we become robots. Humans learn from their own mistakes. It's an educational misdirection to take away the choice of mistakes. A mistake is often not a mistake but a new way of thinking and it opens up new areas for development. Taking away this choice leads to stagnation and decline.

rust won't save your ass from logic mistakes, which are what programming is about (codifying logic for a machine to execute).

It saves your ass from derps and inattention mistakes that are physiological and normal in any project because of human nature (i.e. you are not always 100% at peak mental performance when coding), see bug statistics.

The same can be said about IDE's helping coders by suggesting function names, checking for spelling or syntax errors, and such. Forgetting to close a parenthesis isn't a mistake that teaches you anything nor taking it away is going to cause stagnation and decline.

[cybertraveler]

Rust is special. It quite uniquely, has a good chance of providing some competition for C & C++. Go isn't really competition because it's garbage collected.

The fact that Rust is being developed to fulfil the very practical needs of Mozilla increases its chance at success.

If Rust does turn out to be superior to C in many ways and can improve security I'd love to see it conservatively used in the kernel.