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by steveklabnik 2874 days ago
What didn’t work?
1 comments

We had tremendous difficulty convincing Dr. Comer that using an experimental/nightly toolchain to compile an experimental compiler variant to use experimental libraries in an experimental language was worth it.

It took us quite some time to get everything up in a way that would work on most Purdue systems and our own personal ones and from there even translating the limited codebase we were using unsafe code blocks for nearly everything (and ASM blocks) and some internal code for multicore/ACPI-related things/Galileo boards we haven't made publicly available yet, AFAIK.

At the end of the day, Xinu was small enough and very concisely written and maintained for several decades that switching to a language like Rust wasn't warranted. Similar to sqlite, I suppose. You can email me at avaidyam@purdue.edu if you'd like to know more details/talk to Dr. Comer about Xinu things.

Ah, okay. That all makes sense! I thought you meant that like, the language couldn't do it at all. All the stuff you've said is the current state of things, roughly, for sure. Thanks!

(I'd love to see OS classes use Rust someday, so I'm always trying to keep an eye out for things...)

No worries - while I personally enjoyed Rust it was clear that it was unsustainable for Dr. Comer. He means the best, I assure you. :)