Windows-driver-samples VS rust

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

If you haven't dipped your touch-typing fingers into Rust yet, you really owe it to yourself. Rust is a modern programming language with features that make it suitable not only for systems programming -- its original purpose, but just about any other environment, too; there are frameworks that let your build web services, web applications including user interfaces, software for embedded devices, machine learning solutions, and of course, command-line tools. Since a custom GitHub Action is essentially a command-line tool that interacts with the system through files and environment variables, Rust is perfectly suited for that as well.

Here's an example of someone citing a disagreement between CRT and shell32:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/44650

This in addition to the Rust CVE mentioned elsewhere in the thread which was rooted in this issue:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/04/09/cve-2024-24576.html

Here are some quick programs to test contrasting approaches. I don't have examples of inputs where they parse differently on hand right now, but I know they exist. This was also a problem that was frequently discussed internally when I worked at MSFT.

    #include 

> instead of choosing a certain numbered version of the random library (if I remember correctly) I let cargo download the latest version which had a completely different API.

Yeah, they didn't follow the instructions and got burned. I still think that multiple things went wrong simultaneously for that experience. I wonder if more prevalent uses of `#[doc(alias = "name")]` being leveraged by https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/120730 (which now that I check only accounts for methods and not functions, I should get on that!) so that when changing APIs around people at least get a slightly better experience.

Almost fixed the compiler: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/123325

Rust: A secure, efficient, and modern programming language (omitting ten thousand words). You can simply follow the installation instructions provided on the official website.

Recently did something similar in Rust but for generating SVGs. We've adopted it for snapshot testing of cargo and rustc's output. Don't have a good PR handy for showing Github's rendering of changes in the SVG (text, side-by-side, swiping) but https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/121877/files has newly added SVGs.

To see what is supported, see the screenshot in the docs: https://docs.rs/anstyle-svg/latest/anstyle_svg/

We strongly believe in Rust as a powerful language for building production-grade software, especially for systems like ours that run alongside Kubernetes.

The above Assert<{N % 2 == 1}> requires #![feature(generic_const_exprs)] and the nightly toolchain. See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/76560 for more info.