Almost every thread about Rust for Linux ends up with someone saying "why not Zig instead"? And usually the answer is just "it's less mature" or "nobody pushed it".

I didn't know anything about Zig, so I decided to take a look today... and I'm not very impressed ^^;;

I learned that Zig does not have:

- Destructors
- Macros
- Lifetimes
- Operator overloading

Those are major reasons why I chose Rust for the drm/asahi driver...

It sounds like Zig is trying to be "modern C"... but the whole point of R4L is to not get stuck with C!

All those things Rust has that Zig doesn't are important for the things I'm doing.

Destructors/RAII are fundamental to how the driver tracks and cleans up firmware structures safely and reliably when needed. If I had to write "defer" everywhere it would be a bug-prone mess...

Rust's amazing macros are how I deal with the firmware versioning differences while keeping the driver maintainable. In C you can sort of do that (poorly) with the preprocessor... but Zig doesn't have that either, so that's actually a step back from C, as far as I can tell...!

I don't think I really need to explain lifetimes/memory safety, that's the one thing everyone knows is different between the languages... I'll just say, I am certain I wouldn't have gone from "first render" to "stable accelerated Linux desktop" in 2 days without memory safety.

(continued)

If you're trying Steam games on Asahi Linux and you have one of the higher spec machines, don't be afraid to try turning up the graphics settings!

The VM and x86 emulation stuff causes CPU overhead and latency, but it doesn't affect the GPU, so you might find that a game that can't hit 60FPS at 1080p is CPU-bound and the frame rate doesn't actually drop that much at 1440p or even 4K or with higher texture quality. Just keep in mind higher res = more RAM usage!

I'll work on optimizing some known latency/CPU issues in the future ^^

From a Discord comment about this post:

you know, i'm surprised lina and cyan talk about something so personal publicly

I think people don't write enough about healthy relationship dynamics. Sure, it's personal, but how are others supposed to learn what is healthy and what isn't if we don't talk about it?

The internet is full of horror stories about abuse, neglect, weaponized incompetence, cheating... but you almost never see long posts about positive relationship situations. The bad stories are a good reference for what not to do... but how are people going to learn what to do?

The way relationships are presented in media is very stereotyped, dry and often ritualistic (and sometimes actually veering on abuse or toxicity even when that is not the intent), but it's the only reference a lot of young people have for this stuff. Is that really okay?

I get the feeling a lot of people fall into "tolerable" relationships because they feel obliged to, or due to peer or family pressure, and they never realize that's not how it's supposed to be, because they just don't know. They think that as long as you aren't having regular fights with your partner and there is no physical abuse, that's a healthy relationship. But that's just the lowest bar...

I waited many years until I found Cyan, but I'm so glad I did. 🩵

I regretfully completely understand Wedson's frustrations.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240828211117.9422-1-wedsonaf@gmail.com/

A subset of C kernel developers just seem determined to make the lives of the Rust maintainers as difficult as possible. They don't see Rust as having value and would rather it just goes away.

When I tried to upstream the DRM abstractions last year, that all was blocked on basic support for the concept of a "Device" in Rust. Even just a stub wrapper for struct device would be enough.

That simple concept only recently finally got merged, over one year later.

When I wrote the DRM scheduler abstractions, I ran into many memory safety issues caused by bad design of the underlying C code. The lifetime requirements were undocumented and boiled down to "design your driver like amdgpu to make it work, or else".

My driver is not like amdgpu, it fundamentally can't work the same way. When I tried to upstream minor fixes to the C code to make the behavior more robust and the lifetime requirements sensible, the maintainer blocked it and said I should just do "what other drivers do".

Even when I pointed out that other C drivers also triggered the same bugs because the API is just bad and unintuitive and there are many secret hidden lifetime requirements, he wouldn't budge.

One C driver works, so Rust drivers must work the same way.

This is scary. It's (strong) SafetyNet for websites.

Every now and then I run into another Android app I can no longer run because someone decided my phone, running an official build of my choice of OS, that isn't even rooted, is "not trustable".

Now they want to start doing that for websites.

This kills open Linux on the desktop (including Asahi Linux). It kills alternative browsers. It is a backdoor to kill ad blockers.

No. Just no. Please.

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/explainer.md

✨ Collab announcement!!! ✨

I'm doing a collab with Yume-chan tomorrow morning!! 💫

I'll be a guest on her CAFE AkatsuTEA program~ ❤
I'm so excited!!!! I hope to see you there!!!

Stream starts on Saturday the 17th at 10:00 JST / 01:00 UTC!

RT @akatsukiyumerin@twitter.com
୨♡┈┈┈┈┈┈┈♡୧
CAFE AkatsuTEA
୨♡┈┈┈┈┈┈┈♡୧
Today's Guest✨
Linux Developer Programmer
✨Asahi Lina⌨ (@LinaAsahi )

💖https://youtu.be/YU4oDXA8Xgs
🌸12/17 10:00 JST | 12/16 17:00 PST

#CAFEAkatsuTEA #ENVtubers