None of these problems would affect these people if they didn't insist on making their pet programming languages run on what is essentially a C engine. Rust, like a lot of modern high-level languages, basically compiles to llvm ir and then absconds responsibility, leaving things to the fifty years of engineering involved in getting us to where our compiler backends are. The joke used to be "Java will run anywhere someone writes a JVM in C" but now it's "progamming language will run on whatever target someone wrote for LLVM."
Then, having used the C and C++ toolchains to boost themselves into a simulacrum of self-hosting, they immediately decide they don't want to actually implement their preferred abstractions in the operating systems they want to use, so they write huge FFI libraries to take advantage of the massive amounts of library code and OS interfaces that we've spent the past fifty years writing.
Finally, having arrived on the scene, decided that everyone else is wrong and they're right, using the bad-and-wrong toolchains to bootstrap their throbbingly correct and superior approach, we're treated to angry rants about how fifty years of engineering is messy and why wasn't some omnipotent project manager in the sky keeping all this in check while the world awaited the arrival of someone smart enough to write us, at last, a good and correct programming language?
I totally understand that looking into the spaces where our programming languages and our kernels intersect can lead to anger, dismay, and confusion. They're all living projects who have had to adapt to decades of massive change in the computing world; once the LispM went away all hope was lost for coherence. But whining about it in the context of how it makes this thing you felt like doing slightly more difficult is just petulant noise.
Just like open source developers don't owe anyone specific features or bugfixes, the Unix and C ecosystem doesn't owe anyone a rigorous, provably correct ABI. If you're not happy about it, don't use it. If you want to benefit from the decades of work, you have to accept the pitfalls that sprung up over that half-century. The alternative is to do it over, yourself, according to your principles. I desperately wish someone would; the benefit to computing would be incredible. So far, everyone dips a toe in the FFI pool, declares it to be too cold, and then swims around in it regardless.
Then, having used the C and C++ toolchains to boost themselves into a simulacrum of self-hosting, they immediately decide they don't want to actually implement their preferred abstractions in the operating systems they want to use, so they write huge FFI libraries to take advantage of the massive amounts of library code and OS interfaces that we've spent the past fifty years writing.
Finally, having arrived on the scene, decided that everyone else is wrong and they're right, using the bad-and-wrong toolchains to bootstrap their throbbingly correct and superior approach, we're treated to angry rants about how fifty years of engineering is messy and why wasn't some omnipotent project manager in the sky keeping all this in check while the world awaited the arrival of someone smart enough to write us, at last, a good and correct programming language?
I totally understand that looking into the spaces where our programming languages and our kernels intersect can lead to anger, dismay, and confusion. They're all living projects who have had to adapt to decades of massive change in the computing world; once the LispM went away all hope was lost for coherence. But whining about it in the context of how it makes this thing you felt like doing slightly more difficult is just petulant noise.
Just like open source developers don't owe anyone specific features or bugfixes, the Unix and C ecosystem doesn't owe anyone a rigorous, provably correct ABI. If you're not happy about it, don't use it. If you want to benefit from the decades of work, you have to accept the pitfalls that sprung up over that half-century. The alternative is to do it over, yourself, according to your principles. I desperately wish someone would; the benefit to computing would be incredible. So far, everyone dips a toe in the FFI pool, declares it to be too cold, and then swims around in it regardless.