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by gpderetta 3542 days ago
Having a language-imposed concurrency model would be useless and actively harmful in a system language. Rust provides the building blocks to build whatever safe abstractions are appropriate for the problem and domain at hand, plus a set of out of the box abstractions relatively low level that will be familiar to people coming from other system languages.

And of course the means to get rid of any abstraction and safety when required.

edit: accidentally a word
3 comments
jonathanstrange 3542 days ago
> Having a language-imposed concurrency model would be useless and actively harmful in a system language.

It works fine in Ada.

Edit: Why am I downvoted for this? A language-defined concurrency model is indispensable for having safe and deadlock-free concurrency in the language (rather than in arbitrary utility libraries). That's why concurrency was explicitly included into Ada and into the additional Ravenscar profile. The rationale for this has always convinced me and it also works fine in Ada, so anybody care to elaborate what's wrong with it?

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nickpsecurity 3542 days ago
It worked great for Concurrent Pascal and Solo:

http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/

I agree it's better to have mechanisms that can be turned into a proper model. A good default, though, greatly improves consistency and reliability in real-world systems.

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rwmj 3542 days ago
Only if development of the language and OS are separate. If you co-develop the language with the OS, then it makes perfect sense to push safety features into the language (or conversely, to remove them from the language when they are no longer appropriate).

LISP-strength macros give you most of this capability.

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gpderetta 3542 days ago
OS are not the only use cases for system languages and developing a language to be tightly tied to an os (and viceversa) is a great way to condemn both to obscurity.
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amalcon 3542 days ago
Erm... I think Dennis Ritchie would have had a few things to say about that.
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gpderetta 3542 days ago
good point; though, while designed to work well with each other, neither unix nor C require the other.
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bluejekyll 3542 days ago
If you want a portable C, *libc is practically a requirement. Having POSIX is also a huge boon.
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