[bmn__]

The big problems continue to be

• C being a shitty language that does not force or even encourage programmers to handle errors

• implementation knowledge about file system technology is generally stuck in the 1990s

• disk controller hardware lying to the OS to make them appear more performant than they really are

visit https://danluu.com & ctrl+f "files"

[eafer]

> C being a shitty language that does not force or even encourage programmers to handle errors

I don't see where this is coming from. Most of the world's top filesystems are written in C, and they work just fine. Maybe other languages could get better results, but it's hard to say with so little data.

> implementation knowledge about file system technology is generally stuck in the 1990s

If you are talking about me, that might be true, I'm relatively new to this and still learning. But there's definitely people out there with some serious "implementation knowledge". And tools like xfstests did not exist in the 1990s, that makes a huge difference.

[naasking]

I'm curious why you think file systems written in C would somehow be better than any other type of program written in C. We have plenty of data suggesting C programs have more bugs and vulnerabilities than programs written in safer languages.

[eafer]

If you are thinking about rust, we don't have any data about it in the context of the kernel yet, not even for device drivers. It may prevent some exploitable bugs, but those aren't a big concern for filesystems - otherwise they wouldn't be put inside the kernel at all. The reality is, we don't know if it would help; and given how conservative we all are with our filesystem implementations (for good reasons), it's possible that we never will.

[naasking]

I'm not thinking about anything specific, I'm simply disputing your general claim that moving away from C would not help, when it has clearly helped in every single other domain of software development. I see no real reason why file systems should be any different, but clearly you do, so I was asking you why you think file systems would be different.

And for specific examples of options with better safety records, then sure Rust would be one possibility, as would Ada, or Frama-C if you need to stick with C.

[eafer]

OK, I thought you meant rust because that's the only other language with chances of getting support inside the Linux kernel right now.

> I'm simply disputing your general claim that moving away from C would not help

I never said such a thing, I said we don't know. As always, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.

[queuebert]

Can you elaborate on the second point?

[bmn__]

courses offered by polytechnics and online learning platforms not being up-to-date, restricted and uneven access to expert implementers