The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs. It never caught on in the mobile world. It may perhaps only survive as a remnant in specialised chips and boards designed for learning.
This is a good thing: these languages and runtimes are indeed much safer, and also much more productive than C. You can even still get the same amount of low-level control with Rust.
> in general discouraging peeking under the hood, at the hardware level, as something raw, wild or unsafe.
C is unsafe though. Decades of experience writing software has shown us that even expert C programmers write memory bugs with regularity.
> Yes you can still do it on a RPi
Or any other PC really.
> but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that.
Lunacy. What is the evidence for this?
> The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs.
It was only ever there in the first place with a tiny minority of users, and that minority seems as committed to their craft as they've ever been.
Look at all the locked-down walled-garden platforms proliferating, and this famously prescient story: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
20 years ago, many people thought RMS was a completely insane lunatic. Yet now he seems more like a prophet.
It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom. Letting your children play outside unsupervised is "unsafe". Non-self-driving cars are "unsafe". Eating certain food is "unsafe". Having a rooted mobile device is "unsafe". Not using an approved browser by a company that starts with G is "unsafe". ... Programming in C is "unsafe".
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."
Rust is not a C analog. The whole value proposition of C is simplicity, and Rust is anything but simple.
>> but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that.
> Lunacy. What is the evidence for this?
Look at a platform like Apple. Every release makes it harder to run arbitrary code.
>> The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs.
>It was only ever there in the first place with a tiny minority of users, and that minority seems as committed to their craft as they've ever been.
What do you mean? In early PC's, the way you ran software was to copy code from a magazine and compile and run it on your workstation. Being a PC user at all meant being a tinkerer/hacker a few decades ago.
There are entire CLASSES of computing devices which you cannot put arbitrary code on without severe obstacles...
How do you bootstrap languages like Rust? Another 'safe' language? What about that one?
Someone somewhere has to be working at the asm level.
This is true in both politics and software.
I'd argue that anyone who thinks language safety is some authoritarian handcuff doesn't really understand low-level programming to begin with.
Nobody's suggesting we replace all the C in the world with signed javascript from Google, we're literally talking about compile time checks for pointers here.
In that case you are actually thread safe, though! Just use a language that lets you specify which data can't be sent across threads (Rust isn't the only example, Erlang enforces this entirely dynamically) and use thread locals instead of statics (in a single threaded environment they're effectively the same thing), and tada, you have thread safety that continues to work even if people decide to run your stuff on many different cores.
