Brian Kernighan on Rust, C and Distros

[drhowarddrfine]

Some interesting and fun comments from the legend.

“Ohhh, Rust,” Kernighan said, to audience laughter.

‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”

Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS

Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world today — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone.

thenewstack.io

Full video at the end of the article.

 

[mer]

"And what does Dennis have to say?"

 

[lost_in_c]

I found it specially interesting how he says that a lot, if not most, of the brilliant minds shifted from pure computing to making user candy. Paraphrasing of course.

I think it's a little unfair, because for decades Windows produced some extremely powerful and productive software that had revolutionary effects on all kinds of spheres.

But it's still an interesting thought I hadn't considered. What would have happened if...?

 

[michal244]

I found it specially interesting how he says that a lot, if not most, of the brilliant minds shifted from pure computing to making user candy. Paraphrasing of course.

I think it's a little unfair, because for decades Windows produced some extremely powerful and productive software that had revolutionary effects on all kinds of spheres.

But it's still an interesting thought I hadn't considered. What would have happened if...?

Windows didn't produce anything interesting. All it has are third party applications that would be written for Linux instead.

 

[Crivens]

All it has are third party applications that would be written for Linux instead.

More like QNX or RiscOS.