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by dpc_pw 2590 days ago
> AutoSAR, was it?

Just a real-time hypervisor for Tegra underlying Nvidia Automotive platform. MISRA C, ISO 26262. Bleh. :D

> so the cognitive load of designing at that scale with borrow-checking seems prohibitive

I have multiple 1k - 10k line Rust projects on github, and I hardly ever deal or think about lifetimes. I just randomly opened a project of mine on github, opening some major files and there's literally 0 explicit lifetime annotations anywhere.

People hang up on lifetimes because they are unfamiliar, but for someone that gets some understanding and accepts "ways of Rust" (mostly avoiding cyclical graphs, using IDs instead of pointers, etc.), there are not an issue. Only when designing some weird zero-cost abstractions in performance-critical APIs, trying to avoid any copying, one has to annotate some lifetimes in non-trivial ways. Usually you can just ask someone on IRC and they will give you an answer. :D

The mental overhead is actually way lower than in C (or most languages for that matter). After a while you get used to relying on compiler to check the mundane stuff and focus only on the higher level problems. It's quite relieving actually.

1 comments

MISRA C? Cool!

About the design model for programming in Rust, I guess only making the time to try writing something in Rust can answer the question. It is interesting how the steepness of the Rust learning curve could actually be a hook to get people to try it, which is all any well-designed language would need to gain adherents.

Back to critical systems programming, does MISRA C have a "certified" compiler like CompCert C or something? If so, Rust usage in such a niche must be a long way away - even if one could "certify" the Rust compiler code, how would one "certify" the million+ lines of C++ in LLVM!