spease

> the Rust community is aggressive "rewrite it in Rust!", "no memory unsafe languages!"

This is more of a meme than reality at this point.

> You can't have a house built 100% fast but also 100% cheap and with 100% quality.

That’s essentially what technological development does, is make those tradeoffs more favorable.

Yeah, I cannot understand why people are thinking a gigabyte of RAM in this context save for their context being imagining what this would take with a python HTTPS server streaming video via WebRTC to an electron GUI running out of local docker containers or something. Because that ought to be enough memory for a hour of compressed video.

It’s like saying your family of four is going to take a vacation, so you might need to reserve an entire Hyatt for a week, rather than a single room in a Motel 6.

I really feel like a lot of the people objecting in this thread are people who have just written web apps in Python whose closest experience with the audio-visual space is WebRTC.

Tech for cars is “standard-sized”. Not everything revolves around datacenters and tech, the car industry easily predates the computer industry and operates on a lot tighter margins and a lot stricter regulations.

So having a smaller, simpler chip that ultimately costs less physical resources at scale and is simpler to test is better when you’re planning on selling millions of units and you need to prove that it isn’t going to fail and kill somebody. Or, if it does fail and kill somebody, it’s simpler to analyze to figure out why that happened. You’ve also got to worry about failure rates for things like a separate RAM module not being seated properly at the factory and slipping out of the socket someday when the car is moving around.

Now - yes, modern cars have gotten more complex, and are more likely to run some software using Linux rather than an RTOS or asic. But the original complaint was that a backup camera adds non-negligible complexity / cost.

For a budget car where that would even make sense, that means you’re expecting to sell at high volume and basically nothing else requires electronics. So sourcing 1GB RAM chips and a motherboard that you can slot them in would be complete overkill and probably a regulatory nightmare, when you could just buy an off-the-shelf industrial-grade microcontroller package that gets fabbed en masse, dozens or hundreds of units to a single silicon wafer.

The original comment was complaining about backup cameras seemingly adding significant electronics requirements.

In practice, you’re not going to tie intimate knowledge of the matrix headlights into the infotainment system, that’s just bad engineering. At most it would know how to switch them on and off, maybe a few very granular settings like brightness or color or some kind of frequency adjustment, not worrying about every single LED, but I can’t imagine a budget car ever exposing all that to the end user. Even if you did, that would be some kind of legendarily bad implementation to require a gigabyte of RAM to manage dozens of LEDs. Like, is it launching a separate node instance exposing a separate HTTPS port for every LED at that point?

Ditto for the satellite radio. That can and probably is a separate module, and that’s more of a radio / AV domain piece of tech that’s going to operate in a world that historically hasn’t had the luxury of gigabytes of RAM.

Sensors - if this is a self-driving car with 3D LIDAR and 360-degree image sensors, the backup camera requirement is obviously utterly negligible.

Remember, we had TV for most of the 20th century, even before integrated circuits even existed, let alone computers and RAM. We didn’t magically lose the ability to send video around without the luxury of storing hundreds of frames’ worth of data.

Yeah, at some point it makes more sense to make or grab a chip with slightly more RAM so it has more market reach, but cars are manufactured at a scale where they actually are drivers of microcontroller technology. We are talking about a few dollars for a chip in a car being sold for thousands of dollars used, or tens of thousands of dollars new.

There is just no way that adding a backup camera is an existential issue for product lines.

A gigabyte!?

You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet.

And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display.

Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes.

Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.

There was a library for Rust called “faster” which worked similarly to Rayon, but for SIMD.

The simpleminded way to do what you’re saying would be to have the compiler create separate PTX and native versions of a Rayon structure, and then choose which to invoke at runtime.

“…just think, Wally, everything that makes this thing go was supplied by the lowest bidder.”

- astronaut

Just because the fed exists doesn’t mean the entire economy shuts down with the government.

It depends on how it’s structured.

I started with desktop applications, so my go-to for GUI has been Qt, especially QML. It works on Windows / MacOS / Linux as well as iOS and Android. I think there’s now a way to compile QML to webassembly as well. It also has a ton of support classes that are loosely analogous to the various *Kit things supplied on iOS and Android.

The downside is that the core of Qt is in C++, so it’s mostly seen (or used for?) embedded contexts.

I recently used Slint as well, which isn’t anywhere near as mature, but is at least written in Rust and has some type-safety benefits.

SwiftUI is pretty good too, and I wish I got to work on Apple platforms more.

To me, the simplicity of creating a “Button” when you want a button makes more sense, instead of a React component that’s a div styled by layers of CSS and brought to life by JavaScript.

But I’m kind of bummed that I started with that route (well, and writing partial UI systems for game / media engines a few times) because most people learned web apps and the DOM, and it’s made it harder to get the kind of work I identify with.

So it’s hard for me to recommend Qt due to the career implications…but at the same for the projects I’ve worked on, it’s made a smaller amount of work go a longer way with a more native feel than electron apps seem to have.

Yeah, they could call it Tizen or something.