Slashdot Mirror

Try clang-cl - everything you like about clang, but ABI-compatible with MSVC, and directly supported by Visual Studio.

Of course, the favorable licensing terms of LLVM didn't hurt, either (I think it's MIT or BSD?).

It was originally: University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License: http://releases.llvm.org/2.8/L...

But have been migrating to Apache 2.0 with "LLVM Exception": https://llvm.org/LICENSE.txt

Of course, the favorable licensing terms of LLVM didn't hurt, either (I think it's MIT or BSD?).

It was originally: University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License: http://releases.llvm.org/2.8/L...

But have been migrating to Apache 2.0 with "LLVM Exception": https://llvm.org/LICENSE.txt

Nobody blames the 18-wheeler itself if the driver is too incompetent to load or drive it properly under most conditions

WTF are you talking about? We've long since mandated all kinds of safety features and inspections on 18-wheelers. It's not lawful to load an 18 wheeler above the Federal maximum gross vehicle weight of 80,000lbs, no matter how skilled the driver is. You can't drive without ABS either, even if your driver is so good they don't need it. There are mandatory rest times and maximum duty hours.

So yeah, you're pedantically right that we don't "blame the 18-wheeler" in a crash, in the sense that inanimate objects are really bad targets of blame since they have no agency. Of course the driver is to blame. But we sure as hell go about figuring out how the next generation of 18 wheelers and associated regulation can reduce either the number of mistakes that drivers make or mitigate the negative consequences of those mistakes.

Same thing ought to be in software -- we should work towards memory & type safety that reduces the number of mistakes that programmers make and we should improve isolation and hardening so that the negative consequences of those mistakes are contained. Even in C/C++ there are lots of modern safety features being built in, better verifiers like ASAN and UBSAN. And of course the development of Rust/Go/Java/C# and all the other safe languages.

This isn't really a novel concept. Ever since we decided cars should have crumple zones and safety belts, the road fatalities per mile driven has gone down. Now we have blind spot detection and auto-braking in accidents coming online. In a decade or two we might have self-driving cars. No one is blaming a 1953 Ford Thunderbird for crashing in the rain, but I sure as hell wouldn't drive one in a storm today.

From the LLVM COC:

Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you”
Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts
Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

I've just read the LLVM COC and I cannot see the words you have quoted. They appear to come from the TODO group's COC, which has been adopted by other projects such as those of Github, but not by LLVM.

The situation at LLVM and Outreachy is bad enough; why pretend that it is worse?

MMMMMM, the hypocrisy is juicy. A conservative telling someone to accept people as they are, when you can't.

I'm not a conservative. I'm an equal opportunity hater of both SJWs and gun toting rednecks.

I mean, would we even need these CoCs if it weren't for the fact that Mr Asshole can't stop calling people fags?

The politics are often not introduced based on organic need but rather someone installed into a role where their responsibility is generating bureaucratic policy.

llvm list archives are public. You could actually search them and point out all of the assholes calling others fags but you won't find it because it hasn't happened.

http://lists.llvm.org/mailman/...

I only see this LLVM page regarding Community Code of Conduct, which doesn't include the content you claimed is part of their Code. Where did you get your content from (i.e. the part that begins, "Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort")?

Huh, yeah he did.

https://reviews.llvm.org/D13741#422188

I am still opposed to this. I think think this fails to capture the desire to codify the current practices, not change them. I am afraid that doing this will push us in the direction of
https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/8bda440bb919b6b59ce24de8f077dc31211e3f5a

And we will spend time cleansing ourselves from "dominators" and "cargo cult".

Cheers,
Rafael

He was listing his objections during the draft phase which occurred two years ago.

Maybe it says that somewhere else. I was discussing the Community Code of Conduct, which is on a page labelled Community Code of Conduct, with a url llvm.org/docs/CodeOfConduct.htm. The text you say it "says explicitly" does not appear on that page.

Liar.

https://llvm.org/docs/CodeOfCo...

It does not contain the text you quoted.

None of that stuff is in the LLVM CoC: https://llvm.org/docs/CodeOfCo...

Why are you copy-pasting lies?

You're copy-pasting stuff that isn't in the LLVM CoC: https://llvm.org/docs/CodeOfCo...

Please provide a source for your copy-paste.

alright, amimojo since you too fucking lazy to look it up for self:

http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2016-June/049777.html

Rafael Espíndola via cfe-dev cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
Thu Jun 30 13:23:01 PDT 2016

I am strongly opposed to it as it stands.

Who decided this and with what authority? As written the code of conduct tries restrict the acceptable opinions one may voice even in channels not related to llvm at all.

With this in place I will not consider myself a member of the llvm community anymore and would be terrified to interact with another llvm developer in a social setting.

Rafael

The Outreachy thing was just the last straw. His primary objection is the language in the CoC that polices language and behavior completely outside of the project. Punishing wrongthink.

Agreement is implicit by registering for the conference.

"By registering to attend you agree to abide by the Terms of Conduct". That's quite explicit.

(albeit in a vague way): no personal attacks, good behavior, good manners

You concede the vagueness. So, I ask you again: suppose a woman finds a man in female bathroom... Is he violating the ToC with his bad manners, or is she violating the ToC by disrespecting his "gender fluidity" and "personally attacking" him?

I'm having a hard time understanding the point [...]

No, you are not, stop pretending. The point is, various people consider various things "offensive". I gave examples, you chose to ignore them, so I ask again: what if another attendee objects to my wearing a "MAGA" T-shirt? Am I offending his political beliefs — in violation of the Code of Conduct, or is he trying to suppress mine — in violation of same?

Can you guess, which side will win, if the decision-makers consider Outreachy to be a wholesome organization?

Do you really pretend to not understand, how this "ToC" not merely "has a potential" for abuse by people seeking to further their SJW agenda, but was created to be so abused in the first place?

you're making with your link

That it is possible, in today's America, to not only be expelled from a conference over a perfectly legal item of clothing deemed offensive by Social Justice Warriors, but have police be summoned over it — with a subsequent arrest.

They actually have this in their CoC:

"Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. "

That's funny. I can't seem to find that quote in the Code of Conduct.

They follow by saying they condone "reversism's". In other words if you are white male or female you can be openly harassed within the community because you are considered privileged. What the hell has happened to these projects?!

Again, I don't see that in the actual Code of Conduct.

However, I was able to find those words in a template Code of Conduct posted by the TODO Group. Did you somehow end up reading the wrong code of conduct?

They actually have this in their CoC:

"Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. "

That's funny. I can't seem to find that quote in the Code of Conduct.

They follow by saying they condone "reversism's". In other words if you are white male or female you can be openly harassed within the community because you are considered privileged. What the hell has happened to these projects?!

Again, I don't see that in the actual Code of Conduct.

However, I was able to find those words in a template Code of Conduct posted by the TODO Group. Did you somehow end up reading the wrong code of conduct?

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework. Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend. The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this. [1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... [2] https://www.outreachy.org/appl...

The Outreachy link does say they do not accept males that are caucasian, European, Asian or Arabic. I think he's right for leaving, I would not want to be part of a group that actively discriminates either.

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework. Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend. The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this. [1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... [2] https://www.outreachy.org/appl...

The Outreachy link does say they do not accept males that are caucasian, European, Asian or Arabic. I think he's right for leaving, I would not want to be part of a group that actively discriminates either.

I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them

If that is "the point" then why doesn't it say that in the CoC?

It does. It says to be equally welcoming to everyone.

I think another reason is more important, as quoted from ( http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... ):
"...
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that
openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes
directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project
to not be associated with this. ..."

My personal opinion:
It is sadly becoming more common to support people with some "sexual identity" or some specific genetic lineages ("races") while not being a _general_ support of underrepresented or disadvantaged groups. That's just sexist and racist, no way to sugar coat that. Do your part and don't associate or support extremists.

I have to say, looking at the Community Code of Conduct he's objecting to, I'm finding it hard to figure out what exactly he doesn't like. This is the code of conduct: be friendly and patient, be welcoming, be considerate, be respectful, be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and when we disagree, try to understand why..

all of which seem reasonable. If he wants to violate what seems to be pretty bare-minimum standards of what should be considered acceptable behavior, I'd say that he should leave the community. And not join a different one.

I agree wholeheartedly. I read his "goodbye" email carefully, word by word, to get to the truth of what he said. http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... - He says he us unable to attend LLVM conferences because he does not agree about the code of conduct. More precisely, the conference pages https://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-0... say "By registering for this event, we expect you to have read and agree to the LLVM Code of Conduct". I assume that "agree to the code of conduct" means "agree to abide by the code of conduct". If he can't agree to those minimum standards of acceptable behavior, then sure he shouldn't be admitted to the conference.

As for "being associated with" -- well, okay, though it seems pretty wishy-washy. I disregard the media practice of saying "X is associated with Y which is associated with Z". It's a sloppy shorthand way of attacking X for something that X didn't actually say or do.

I have to say, looking at the Community Code of Conduct he's objecting to, I'm finding it hard to figure out what exactly he doesn't like. This is the code of conduct: be friendly and patient, be welcoming, be considerate, be respectful, be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and when we disagree, try to understand why..

all of which seem reasonable. If he wants to violate what seems to be pretty bare-minimum standards of what should be considered acceptable behavior, I'd say that he should leave the community. And not join a different one.

I agree wholeheartedly. I read his "goodbye" email carefully, word by word, to get to the truth of what he said. http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... - He says he us unable to attend LLVM conferences because he does not agree about the code of conduct. More precisely, the conference pages https://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-0... say "By registering for this event, we expect you to have read and agree to the LLVM Code of Conduct". I assume that "agree to the code of conduct" means "agree to abide by the code of conduct". If he can't agree to those minimum standards of acceptable behavior, then sure he shouldn't be admitted to the conference.

As for "being associated with" -- well, okay, though it seems pretty wishy-washy. I disregard the media practice of saying "X is associated with Y which is associated with Z". It's a sloppy shorthand way of attacking X for something that X didn't actually say or do.

I have to say, looking at the Community Code of Conduct he's objecting to, I'm finding it hard to figure out what exactly he doesn't like. This is the code of conduct: be friendly and patient, be welcoming, be considerate, be respectful, be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and when we disagree, try to understand why..

all of which seem reasonable. If he wants to violate what seems to be pretty bare-minimum standards of what should be considered acceptable behavior, I'd say that he should leave the community. And not join a different one.

I agree wholeheartedly. I read his "goodbye" email carefully, word by word, to get to the truth of what he said. http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai... - He says he us unable to attend LLVM conferences because he does not agree about the code of conduct. More precisely, the conference pages https://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-0... say "By registering for this event, we expect you to have read and agree to the LLVM Code of Conduct". I assume that "agree to the code of conduct" means "agree to abide by the code of conduct". If he can't agree to those minimum standards of acceptable behavior, then sure he shouldn't be admitted to the conference.

As for "being associated with" -- well, okay, though it seems pretty wishy-washy. I disregard the media practice of saying "X is associated with Y which is associated with Z". It's a sloppy shorthand way of attacking X for something that X didn't actually say or do.

You are not wrong, but you aren't entirely correct either.

Originally, LLVM stood for Low Level Virtual Machine

PROOF: click!, (Illinois Computer Science magazine), 2013, Volume II, Page 13

That prototype included a lot of the key design
elements of what would become LLVM, says Adve.
LLVM originally stood for "low level virtual machine,"
but as LLVM has expanded its capabilities it has left
that acryonym behind and is known only by its initials

Anyone who has worked in compilers knows that the "front-end" translates the programming language into a AST (Abstract Syntax Tree), whilst the "back-end" translates the AST into assembly language. LLVM "abstracted" the assembly language into two parts:

The two pieces of the LLVM code generator are the high-level interface to the code generator and the set of reusable components that can be used to build target-specific backends.

An excerpt for you:

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend.

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.

Wrong. He's leaving because of crap like this.

From the LLVM COC:

You mean, this LLVM Code of Conduct? https://llvm.org/docs/CodeOfConduct.html?

His actual words from the mail list:

"The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this."
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...

So he's leaving because the "LLVM code of
conduct" says incendiary things like "Be friendly and patient." and "Be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others".

I assume you're trying to suggest that's ridiculous - but seriously, fuck that.

If someone deserves a rude response, be rude to them. This stupid "respect every snowflake" shit is massively damaging.

No, I am NOT going to be friendly and patient. I'm not going to be careful of the words I choose. If you prove you're a stupid dumbshit, I'm going to say so. I don't have time to deal with that shit. I don't need to. I don't want to. The left may be all about "tolerating everyone" (except, of course, for conservatives, the irony of which they never seem to grasp), but that doesn't make it a good thing.

And as other people have pointed out, it isn't just that, you're oversimplifying. The code of conduct thing and the outreach program are codifying discrimination in an area where there's no need for it. The only thing anyone can tell via online communications is your ability. Tech should be a meritocracy and these attempts to make up for lack of ability with sob stories are destroying it.

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that
openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes
directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project
to not be associated with this.

[1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...
[2] https://www.outreachy.org/appl...

What if the group was "white straight dudes under 30 only" would giving money to this group still be ok?

It's rather rich to preach tolerance of other tribes and at the same time actively promote and give money to clubs whose only requirement for belonging is tribal purity.

I don't see how it is possible to preach tolerance while actively supporting and funding tribalism while not becoming a hypocrite in the process.

If you want more diversity or whatever there are ways to get there that don't involve nurturing tribalism.

Link and excerpt:

The reason for me leaving are the changes in the community. The current license change discussions unfortunately bring to memory the fsf politics when I was working on gcc. That would still not be sufficient reason to leave. As with the code, llvm will still have the best license and if the only community change was the handling of the license change I would probably keep going.

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend.

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.

So long, and thanks for all the bugs,
Rafael

Link and excerpt:

The reason for me leaving are the changes in the community. The current license change discussions unfortunately bring to memory the fsf politics when I was working on gcc. That would still not be sufficient reason to leave. As with the code, llvm will still have the best license and if the only community change was the handling of the license change I would probably keep going.

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend.

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.

So long, and thanks for all the bugs,
Rafael

He says the reason for abandoning LLVM development after 12 years is due to changes in the community. In particular, the "social injustice" brought on the organization's new LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year's Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development.

This paraphrase deliberately attempts to mislead the reader into thinking he is anti-woman and anti-minority.

http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.

He is in fact against discrimination and Outreachy's exclusionary nature.

be friendly and patient,
be welcoming,
be considerate,
be respectful,
be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and
when we disagree, try to understand why.

the only part of this that I can possibly think he might object to is the fifth one, which some people might consider suppressing free speech, but this is elaborated in the next paragraph as meaning:

Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren’t acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person. Discriminatory jokes and language. Posting sexually explicit or violent material. Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”). Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms. Unwelcome sexual attention. Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.

all of which seem reasonable. If he wants to violate what seems to be pretty bare-minimum standards of what should be considered acceptable behavior, I'd say that he should leave the community. And not join a different one.

So he's leaving because the "LLVM code of conduct" says incendiary things like "Be friendly and patient." and "Be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others".

Oh, and they're participating in an outreach program to encourage under-represented demographics to participate in open source project.

I guess that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

You can pay people to do something that won't matter in the end, but unpaid volunteers need some more substantial justification for the time and effort they invest. Better than to start a new effort from scratch would be to distill the aspects of this idea that are new and better than existing compilers, and take those to the community surrounding an existing open-source effort, such as http://llvm.org/

http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/c...

I read LLVM Project Blog; I think it said it was done partly for code maintenance issues. As, in it should be faster to add patches for Windows using the same Compiler over all platforms.

Note: They are still using Microsoft linker.

Tim S.

Browsing llvm/clang's mailing list, I also found that variant 1 is getting a compiler work around. Though this requires opt-in from each vulnerable call site.

Variant 2 is being patched in compilers. Both gcc and clang are working on patches (that might already be released?) that avoid any speculative execution of indirect branching. Using a trick documented by google to patch the stack with the destination address, and then return. So now we just have to recompile *everything* that has access to privileged / sensitive memory contents to hopefully prevent attackers doing anything useful with branch poisoning. Of course there will be a performance hit, as no indirect branches can be correctly predicted.

Interesting! Thank you for the additional info.

I skimmed both papers, and that seems to about sum it up. Though I would add that all three attacks cause speculative execution of a construction like; "x = array[ *pointer ];", to push memory from an array into or out of cache based on the data loaded from the victim pointer. So combining the announcement does make some sense, as the details of any of those variants might point people to rediscovering the others.

I was impressed with the work put into variant 2. Tricking the CPU branch predictor into running ROP-like gadgets within a higher privileged process, then using cache access timing to work out what happened. It almost sounds like bad sci-fi dialog, yet they actually did it. And yes, the attack complexity sounds comparable to similar ROP stack smashing exploits.

Variant 2 is being patched in compilers. Both gcc and clang are working on patches (that might already be released?) that avoid any speculative execution of indirect branching. Using a trick documented by google to patch the stack with the destination address, and then return. So now we just have to recompile *everything* that has access to privileged / sensitive memory contents to hopefully prevent attackers doing anything useful with branch poisoning. Of course there will be a performance hit, as no indirect branches can be correctly predicted.

Personally I would say that the problem with variant 2 is sharing the branch predictor between domains. Branches taken in one process, influence how branches in other processes are predicted. I can understand that in a modern OS, multiple processes end up running the same library code, so this may have been a deliberate decision. But, if these tables were stored per-thread and context switched, this problem would probably have never been exploitable.

The Spectre paper did suggest that they had found some evidence of something like variant 2 on an AMD CPU. But I believe that the inner workings of AMD's branch predictor are not as easily deduced as Intel's. So the researchers took the easiest route and attacked 3 different Intel cores instead. That doesn't mean that nobody will ever work out how to pull off an attack though.

For C code, you can use clang's built in fuzzer. With clang's other sanitizers checking that you aren't triggering any other undesirable behaviour.

This submission is a general news story at best, and shouldn't be on Slashdot's front page.

If we wanted to be subjected to general news like this, we could have gone to the website of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, or any other mainstream news network.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about this earthquake. It's not even a top 40 earthquake.

I can sort of understand Slashdot reporting about an earthquake like the one that hit Japan a few years back, causing the Fukushima problems. But there was clearly a significant technology aspect to that ordeal, with the nuclear power plant being affected.

And I can even sort of understand Slashdot reporting about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that killed over 200,000 people, given its very significant death toll.

Both of those earthquakes are among the top 4 most powerful recorded earthquakes. There's at least something notable about that.

But this earthquake? It was powerful, but relatively minor in the whole scheme of things.

The whole point of a site like Slashdot is to have a narrow, but deep, focus on a specific type of news. In the case of Slashdot it should be news focused on math, science, computing, and technology. A relatively routine earthquake isn't relevant here.

Instead of irrelevant general news submissions like this one, we should have relevant ones about things like the release of the LLVM 5.0 compiler suite or submissions about how Mozilla's Rust and Servo projects appear to be failing. I'd submit them myself, but Slashdot's submission process is broken (it requires an account).

The more that Slashdot pollutes its front page with useless submissions like this one, the less relevant Slashdot gets. The whole point of Slashdot is to focus on the news that other news providers just don't bother with.

There's some huge technology news breaking at the moment. LLVM 4.0 has been released. This release is a big deal with lots of great changes. This release really puts the future of the GNU GCC project in doubt. Will GCC be able to catch up to LLVM within a reasonable period of time? Will GCC be able to remain relevant when facing such a strong competitor? Some analysts aren't so sure that GCC will be able to survive in the long run.

There's some huge technology news breaking at the moment. LLVM 4.0 has been released. This release is a big deal with lots of great changes. This release really puts the future of the GNU GCC project in doubt. Will GCC be able to catch up to LLVM within a reasonable period of time? Will GCC be able to remain relevant when facing such a strong competitor? Some analysts aren't so sure that GCC will be able to survive in the long run.

Tell me this does not look useful to someone working on modern compiler issues!

First: I've had to use style cop. It sucks. But ... we each have our own variation of 'style'; which can be seen here. So, why not have a 'stylecop' that acts locally; on white space & comments? If I like 3 spaces, and you like 4; we can just get along. The style is formatted on view, not on compile. This would also fix his problem: When he views it... it will 're-format' to something he likes to see.

Check out clang-format. It's by far the best code formatting tool I've used, and using it allows you to stop thinking about formatting. However, your idea of everyone reformatting the code all the time to their preferred style is silly. Set a project style, "document" it in a .clang-format file and require everyone to use it. Everyone working on a project can learn the project's style; the tool just helps to make sure that it's applied consistently.

So do Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, C#, PHP, Tcl, Lua, Erlang, Go, Swift, Haskell, OCaml, JavaScript, and numerous other languages with garbage collection or other forms of automatic memory management. So Rust is nothing special.

But Rust is special, because it was designed to be used without garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't free and this is one of the main reasons that C/C++ is still used today.

At least you're admitting there's nothing special about Rust. That's more than most of its supporters are smart enough to do. Most of them just keep on insisting it's "safer", despite the Rust implementation itself being bogged down with bugs.

You clearly have a problem with reading comprehension. It is safer with the class of bugs I mentioned, the #1 source of security bugs and memory corruption bugs that waste a lot of time tracking down.

The newer parts of many C++ projects are written using these techniques. Some examples you may have heard of are LLVM (funny, Rust's implementation uses this!), Boost, and Qt.

Oh, so you won't get problems like this:

"This was precisely the root cause of the memory problem: MDNodeFwdDecl's constructor always tried to construct its ReplaceableMetadataImpl parent past the end of its allocated memory buffer, because its own operator new was not properly overloaded. Sometimes there are no visible side-effects because of this, and things seem to work. However, Valgrind always flags it."

Stallman has always had the right idea IMHO

How was it a "right" idea? The society — and generations of programmers — were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts and repulsed a substantial body of programmers, who preferred the truly free BSD-license instead. Instead of cooperating, people and groups ended up competing. And when the original GPL proved to not be "enough" — for example, it was still possible to use GPL2-licensed gcc in a BSD-project, Stallman doubled down with GPL3, forcing FreeBSD, for example, to switch from gcc to BSD-licensed clang.

put up against Corp Profit will never win sadly

Yep, these denunciations of "profit" is the very core of the problem. Generations of young idiots do not realize, that profit is simply a reward for doing something people want. There is nothing wrong or shameful about it and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.

You write your languages in C with ASM for the places it makes sense.

The GCC developers aren't using only C any more, and LLVM is written in C++, as is clang.

The low-level parts of language runtimes might be written in a mix of C and assembler, but that's another matter.

Python provides no true concurrency due to global interpreter lock. Java is not suitable for realtime due to unpredictable GC, while C/C++ is not suitable for anything which should never crash or return random results due to memory corruption.

Python has multiprocessing for 'true concurrency' if you need it
Java is not actually used for anything real-time
C/C++ can be written safely if you are willing to be careful and unit-test (also managed memory with C++11/14 constructs helps the drudgery) with tools like ASAN and Valgrind.

Yes, those are hard problems, but it's also 2015 and we can come up with powerful compilers and JIT virtual machines. Going back to less concurrency than plain old shell scripts where '&' starts a true separate process is not an answer.

Good thing no one proposed that.

This. C can be fixed. It takes time, and compilers are usually ahead of the standard. How long did it take for C to get the restrict keyword? That allows us to control pointer aliasing in a portable way. The impetus for that was that FORTRAN could outperform C because, AFAIK, it assumes no aliasing.

There are already a lot of static checkers for C. I'm willing to wager they can catch just as many bugs at compile-time as Rust. Having such tools is almost as good as having checks integrated into a standard implementation. If you go ahead in C, the standard may catch up to you without you having to worry about the risk of a new language.