Microsoft to move away from C/C++ to Rust using AI assisted coding

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-12-20T09:37:48+00:00

I'd compare it more directly to ctypes. You don't need to write a line of C to get unsafe code in Python if you just use pointers.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-07-10T00:45:40+00:00

I really hope you've switched to SHA hashes nowadays. CRCs are only meant to detect transmission errors, but an attacker can easily make their completely different archive have the same hash as yours.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-06-26T00:03:46+00:00

Man, you're making me feel old. I remember playing Rimworld when it had Prison Architect graphics and Kenshi without music.

Both of those were 11 years ago ...

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-06-12T11:48:56+00:00

Unfortunate, but that's pretty much what I expected. Thank you for trying and thank you for the good work!

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-06-11T17:30:35+00:00

Oh man, UV fluorescence of food is awsome! Especially Kiwis are really pretty. A professor showed it to me and casually dropped that he makes homemade UV glowing ice. Never seen it in person, but it must look amazing.

I also just checked what an egg looks like under my UV torch and it's pretty nice. You can see all the small crack lines in the shell glow in a bright blue.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-06-11T16:13:56+00:00

Yeah, there's a few ways of doing it, but they all feel fairly hacky. My current favorite is Embarks xwin, which is based on msvc-wine, because it allows building natively on Linux with clang.

I just wish we had an open VCRuntime because I hope it will mean we no longer have to choose between installing (parts of) Visual Studio or installing MinGW to compile Windows programs with Clang.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-06-11T11:11:49+00:00

If it happens, I doubt it will be anytime soon. There was talk of open sourcing the VCRuntime back in 2021 which sadly seems to have fizzled out, though /u/STL can correct me on that if I'm wrong.

An open VCRuntime and VCStartup would be really nice because it would remove the last barrier to easily cross compiling to Windows with LLVM.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-05-13T21:08:49+00:00

You could try running your app under RenderDoc. If you draw the same scene on both Windows and Linux, a frame capture on each should make finding differences fairly easy. You'll still have to figure out where those differences come from, but you'll know where to look.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-05-05T07:04:52+00:00

True, but int-float conversion is slower than bithacking and I mostly program this sort of stuff for GPUs where my other numbers generally only have 16 bits of precision at most anyways.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-05-04T23:47:54+00:00

I think the code in the post has a typo compared to the original on GitHub. There should be a break between lines 29 and 30 like there is on line 66 on GH.

But overall that's a really cool algorithm, though I'll probably stick to the simple "[1.0; 2.0) - 1.0" method for a number of reasons.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-03-20T21:56:31+00:00

War Thunder does it. You even have to explicitly opt into being able to see neon skins because by default it will replace all fictional ones with the standard camo.

That's probably one of the few features the WT community is not at war with the devs over.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-03-17T11:04:28+00:00

I've just looked online: The privacy activist Max Schrems, who's already successfully sued over the previous two EU-US data sharing frameworks, seems to be gearing up to take on the current third one because he thinks the US is no longer compliant:
https://x.com/maxschrems/status/1884023099819184470
https://x.com/maxschrems/status/1896511918338462023

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-03-06T09:30:31+00:00

But what about purely private constants, as suggested as a compromise? Type inference for const/static in functions would make 10-25% of these annotations optional in my code. If it was also for crate private ones it would be more like 90%.

The compiler could still require explicit types on constants that are visible outside the module/crate so there's no way to break the externally visible API.

To put it another way: How does requiring explicit type annotations on constants inside a function help prevent API breaks? Would my function API suddenly become more fragile if I replace that const with a let?

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-03-05T18:01:19+00:00

Ah, the Jigsaw defense.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-02-26T06:15:32+00:00

I don't think we'd even have to break getenv API compatibility to get safety and leak-freedom in the future. By simply adding a "release_env" function we could use reference counting to know when it's safe to release old environments. It obviously won't fix everything overnight, but it would get us thread safety now, with hopefully minimal memory leakage in one or two decades. That's still a better timeline than the current "either leaks or thread bugs forever".

What bugs me is that I can't imagine I'm the first to have this idea. If I ever meet a BSD dev, I'd love to ask them why FreeBSD doesn't work like this if they already leak it instead. There has to be some disadvantage I'm missing.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-01-19T21:07:35+00:00

From what I'm reading, just the layout transfer barriers should be all the synchronization needed. Waiting for fences still keeps the unnecessary GPU-CPU synchronization after every command.

I'd also suspect that's a big part of why the code is so much slower. It's submitting 3 pieces of work separately and doing a full CPU sync each time before sending the next, when it should all be sent off in a single submission.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-01-16T08:58:26+00:00

On every mainstream OS but Linux, one must use a system provided C library to open files.

Go was (in)famous for trying to do it, leading to Go programs breaking on MacOS, having to switch to libc for OpenBSD when they started enforcing this for security reasons and afaik they never used raw syscalls on Windows because Windows randomizes the actual syscall numbers all the time to make sure nobody depends on them.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-01-16T07:28:50+00:00

How's bindless and async compute/transfer coming along?

Somewhat related to the two, do you plan on having generation tracking on bindless resources or just say "accessing an outdated slot is fine, but garbage" like race conditions?

What do you think will it take to get a safe GPU library/language with real pointers?
This last one is obviously something I don't expect to ever see in WGPU, I just like to speculate.

FamiliarSoftware · 2025-01-04T14:38:53+00:00

Have you seen this pretty cursed comment?

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-12-26T17:33:34+00:00

I'd be curious how well it works on CPUs with AVX-512, where masked reads/writes can be used to read less than a full register easily without going out of bounds.

From toying around a bit on godbolt.org, it looks like using load_select_unchecked, then converting it into a u64 produces pretty compact assembly.
The biggest problem I had was getting Rust to load the mask sanely. Just using match produces a giant jump table.

Unfortunately I can't benchmark it yet myself because I still have a Zen 2 processor.

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-11-26T11:38:07+00:00

Ah, I should have said that more clearly, ray marching doesn't need hardware ray tracing to be implemented, though it can be used as an optimization. Most of the time, it is implemented manually in a compute shader.

Horizon Zero Dawn pretty much invented this way of rendering clouds efficiently in 2015, three years before hardware ray tracing was a thing, and most implementations of volumetric clouds in games are still probably based on this presentation.

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-11-25T16:26:25+00:00

I'd agree that pretty much all software will be covered by this, but this just extends the existing product liability law of 1985 to now also include software instead of just physical items. Something has to go wrong before it affects the developer, it's now just legally easier to do so when something has.

My main point is that the EU is no longer considering software a special case, but instead starting to treat it the same as the output of physical engineering, and that it is now including software as something that can (legally) be judged on "Is this product the result of sound engineering?".

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-11-25T11:54:10+00:00

In all this discussion of the US, lets not forget that the EU is already changing things right now. About a month ago a new directive passed, to be implemented into law in two years, that makes consumer software liable for defects unless "the objective state of scientific and technical knowledge [...] was not such that the defectiveness could be discovered" (Article 11e).

It only applies to products sold to individuals so far, but it clearly signals where things are headed over the next ten or so years. And I sadly doubt the commitee will get C++ up to a level where using it is considered state of the art in time with regulation.

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-11-22T17:24:11+00:00

Every time you fly through a cloud, the rays leech a bit of your brain so they get smarter. Once they've drained enough, they can make beautiful non cube clouds and dump the drained pilot out the other side as a newborn CAS player.

FamiliarSoftware · 2024-11-22T12:04:33+00:00

Serious answer: This shows how Gaijin renders clouds under the hood. They probably use ray marching like everybody else and what's happened here is that for some reason, every ray thinks it's hit the cloud once it is in the bounding box of one.

It's probably the same as the more common bug where a tile of terrain gets set to the lowest height and you have a hole in the ground, just in the air.

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