Re:Rust: “Move fast and break things” as a moral imperative
by PuercoPop on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @01:35PM
(#26080981)
> doesn’t even say that a byte is 8 bits
That is likely due to the fact the historically that wasnt the meaning of the word. There is a reason the RFC for IP uses octet to refer to 8 bit bytes. Another example of an old document that doesnt use byte to refer to 8 bit bytes is the Common Lisp standard.
So even though the current definition of byte is 8-bits the fact that the C standard uses the old definitiom is most likely because it is a document that can be traced back to an era were there was more diversity in the hardware architectures in common use.
Re:Rust: “Move fast and break things” as a moral imperative
by ddevault on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @12:14PM
(#26079992)
Maintaining T2 platforms doesn't need to be a lot of work unless you make it so. Rust made that choice by being extraordinarily complicated, which I don't feel compelled to forgive it for.
There are a lot of platforms which aren't as stupid as "bytes aren't 8 bits" and are still useful to support. Rust supports TWO architectures with anything other than broken promises.
Yep. And devoting more resources to this, IMO, does not have the payoff of devoting more resources to making the language better or improving Rust on T1 platforms.
I think C, for example, was held back by support for esoteric platforms, such that the language doesn’t even say that a byte is 8 bits, or what the encoding for a string is. It gives great flexibility, but it has huge costs.