> homeless people [...] are just more visible in the bay area due to lax rules for them
I'm not normally someone who picks on phrasing, but this one is a little orwellian. The implication is that, while homelessness is endemic basically everywhere, the proper "rules" for them to obey are that they are not to be seen. And enforcement regimes that allow them to exist in public are "lax"?
I still think you're missing the point. GCC indeed didn't invent "inline assembly as a string", no.
GCC invented "constraint metalanguage as the foundation for inline assembly generation", which is the model here that enables one compiler and one syntax to work the same way for basically every architecture over decades. Modelling the interior of the assembly code as a black box (which in this implementation means "string") is just a side effect of this important design choice.
Again, the stuff you're imagining isn't a general purpose assembly language model, it's an x86-specific hack that works only on the specific compilers and architectures for which it was targeted.
It's not "PC based" that's the magic you want, it's the assumption of x86 (and, very recently, sorta, ARM, in a few compilers).
Architectures are weird, assembly is crazy. There just isn't going to be a single set of semantics around what you want.
This Rust thing isn't revolutionary, it's indeed just a prettier way of writing the model GCC invented a few decades back:
+ "Assembly" is a black box for the code author.
+ The compiler's job is generating code around the assembly, not the code itself.
+ So the fundamental model is "constraints": the rules the compiler needs to follow before and after the assembly, and how to emit an appropriate string to represent the register/address/immediate/whatever requested by the assembly code.
And like it or not, this works. It works really well. Generations of OSes have been written in this model without much complaint (beyond the general ugliness of the gcc syntax, which Rust is trying to fix).
I think this is fine. I agree it's not going to bring a revolution, but we really don't want one in this space.
I'm not normally someone who picks on phrasing, but this one is a little orwellian. The implication is that, while homelessness is endemic basically everywhere, the proper "rules" for them to obey are that they are not to be seen. And enforcement regimes that allow them to exist in public are "lax"?
Yikes.