Windows-driver-samples VS rfcs

The state machine example is definitely a very fitting use of goto, but it reminds me of another thing that seems to have become a rare skill but is very useful: flowcharting. Besides making people comfortable with goto in general, it also helps visualise control flow in ways that a lot of programmers these days don't realise, and it's unfortunate that a lot of courses seem to have omitted its teaching.

Also worth reading is "GOTO Considered Harmful Considered Harmful": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056434

And here Microsoft provides us with lovely example of such ridiculous nesting.

That's a very memorable example, but ultimately the true cause of that monstrosity is a clearly stupid API design; this is the API for a file picker, the recommended replacement for an existing one that they wanted to deprecate. In the existing one, you fill in a structure and call a single function with a pointer to it. In its replacement, you need to call a dozen methods on an object, and check for "possible" errors on each call, even if probably 99% of them only do things like assign to a field in a now-opaque structure and can never produce an error. Then the example code must've been edited by someone with severe gotophobia. (Not all MS code is like that --- they have plenty of other example code that uses goto, e.g.: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/blob/mai... )

The source code for the sample can be found here. Check this code out to a local folder and use the included visual studio solution to open it up. You should be able to build this code as is; if it's telling you that you need spectre mitigated libraries to build it you can either acquire those via the visual studio installer or go to Project Properties > C++ > Code Generation > Spectre Mitigation and select disabled (I have it enabled so disabling it could cause issues, probably not though).

This project was my first experience working with device drivers, and uses the Windows devcon utility to disable and re-enable a device driver.

So a quick look at the Wikipedia site of "Virtual Audio Cables" reveals that it's based in n a custom windows driver. Based on that I would start here

Given that they're essential and worth about $1.8 million, then, it sounds like the proper solution would be to argue for the budget to engage a developer to write, test and sign a replacement driver. (Especially since the Intel 82930 USB test board is literally used by Microsoft as an archetypal example device in USB driver development documentation.)

Maybe corresponding Windows API? https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/master/audio/simpleaudiosample and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/getting-started-with-wdm-audio-drivers.

Well yes. But Linus is right on that one.

I wouldn't say Windows drivers were C++, more like "C with Classes" (and maybe a little bit C++)

Also, Windows drivers are usually much more convoluted than Linux drivers https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

A more practical resource are the various driver samples Microsoft provides: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

RFC: Add large language models to Rust

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

Congrats!

> Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

> uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

> uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

This is great to see though!

I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

[4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

[5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

[6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469