I really like this idea but can anyone please summarize what it does for me. To me it feels very fascinating (bare metal golang in general) but I am not sure I truly understand its usecase and I would love to know more.
I've been idly following this stuff on & off for years, but I never saw proving a point "instead of using Rust" as one of the motivations of the project. Was that ever stated anywhere?
And Linux kernel is written in C etc, so by this logic you don't even need memory safety. There is no good excuse for designing a language in modern times (this century) with every object nullable by default. C# at least mostly has solved this design mistake later by introducing nullable reference types (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-ref...). Then again, Go designers insisted that generics were also unnecessary, until they changed their mind.
On the contrary, because there we have 40 years of security exploits to prove otherwise, and Linux kernel has plenty of CVEs.
C# solution doesn't work, most projects never adopted it, because it is a mess to use with third party libraries that never bothered to add the required annotations, hence why it is still a warning and optional to this day.
I’m not sure which .NET libraries you are referring to, but all the ones we use have nullable reference types enabled. If you configure warnings as errors (as you should), then it works exceptionally well. Even if you were to use a library where nullable reference types are not enabled, you only need to check for null once during the library call, rather than everywhere in your codebase.
What? NRTs are used everywhere with WarningAsErrors:nullable also gaining popularity. Whatever environment you are dealing with C# in, if it’s the opposite I suggest getting away from that ASAP.
sidenote: just a heads up that I tried emailing you recently to let you know that you might want to contact the HN mods to find out why all your comments get set to dead/hidden automatically.
Your account might have triggered some flag sometime back and relies on users vouching for your comments so they can become visible again.
I saw the email, and thanks. This is okay - I did not exercise (nor anyone should) good impulse control when dealing with bad faith arguments, which inevitably led to an account ban. Either way, Merry Christas!
The number of memory safety CVEs written in C by people who ostensibly 'didn't need training wheels' point strongly to the antithesis of your argument.
And I say that as someone who's been a kernel engineer for 20 years.
Nah, people ignore on purpose that C creators are the first to acknowledge C's flaws, hence why Alef, Limbo and Go were created by them, and Plan 9/Inferno as improvements on UNIX.
Too many focus on where the journey started instead of where it ended.
Yeah, it’s very much like the meme showing the bell curve with the novice and the wizard/expert both saying “I can’t write safe C code” and the guy in the middle bragging that he can.
When you turn on a computer, it transfers code to software required to get the machine up and running reliably--the boot process. That used start in a chip called the BIOS. It's a 40-year old holdover from the early days of the IBM PC. UEFI is a more complex and feature-rich protocol. Due to its default memory management Go hasn't been considered the first choice for such purposes but this proof of concept uses Go for the very low level code needed for UEFI.
There aren't that many UEFI shells and the ones that exist are certainly not modern. Anything new is helpful, especially if its written in a popular language like Go.
> Go applications built with GOOS=none would run on bare metal, without any underlying OS. All required support is provided by the Go runtime and external driver packages, also written in Go.
And:
> These hooks act as a "Rosetta Stone" for integration of a freestanding Go runtime within an arbitrary environment, whether bare metal or OS supported.
