Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#111

Post by throwaway894345 » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #96

throwaway894345 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Not sure about BSD, but I was wading into building the GNU coreutils and other GNU packages just yesterday. Fresh hell, they all seem to be build dependencies of each other. ‘sed’ is its own build dependency. The whole C ecosystem is a joke with respect to builds—all dependencies are implicit; you’re just expected to have the exact dependencies installed on your system at the exact versions and in the exact loc…

> Fresh hell, they all seem to be build dependencies of each other. ‘sed’ is its own build dependency. Except that people have run into the exact same issue with stuff like rustc and cargo. Bootstrapping an entirely new platform is just hard, no way around it.

Comparing coreutils to a self-hosting compiler is a strained analogy. Bootstrapping a compiler is about as hard as it gets; there’s no reason coreutils needs to depend on itself.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#112

Post by black_puppydog » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #61

This is less "On Rust" and more "On accepting a rewrite of any tool into OpenBSD, on the merits of memory safety alone". There isn't really much of a statement or judgment on Rust. At most there's an interesting point on it's value proposition: > However there is a rampant fiction that if you supply a new safer method everyone will use it. For gods sake, the simplest of concepts like the stack protector took nearly 1…

Anecdata to the rescue: since installing ripgrep, my use of grep has plummeted. If I ever use it, it's because it comes as part for a copy/paste command I'm running.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#113

Post by _wldu » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

Rust++ will solve this.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#114

Post by random_savv » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

bsdubernerd wrote: post #103

It also doesn't help that Rust keeps on pushing on the idea that "static linking is the only way to go". This is another cargo-cult which I wish didn't end up being engrained so deep in the toolchain because while it has some merits, it also has significant drawbacks of a typical unix distribution. Static linking might be good for folks distributing a single server binary over a fleet of machines (pretty much like Go…

Cargo cult - what a great pun!

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#115

Post by gmanley » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

geocar wrote: post #83

loup-vaillant wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/d4e96b33e34373399... I read 2013, Theo de Raadt's email is from 2017, over 4 years later. I think we can fault him for being overconfident and not checking his facts.

That commit doesn't have any files in it. The first release of "uutils coreutils" appears to be this: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/511f138e3856e2d69... which is only twenty days young, and a 0.0.1 release to boot (whatever that means).

The first four utils were added 7+ years ago: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/9653ed81a2fbf393f...

This has been developed for a while. You're looking at the official GitHub releases which doesn't mean much. It just means they just started providing official compiled releases. Not all projects even do that at all.

I know a lot of people getting into Rust, including myself, started reading through this repo. This was one of the first good real-world examples of Rust, that I found.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#116

Post by benibela » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #61

This is less "On Rust" and more "On accepting a rewrite of any tool into OpenBSD, on the merits of memory safety alone". There isn't really much of a statement or judgment on Rust. At most there's an interesting point on it's value proposition: > However there is a rampant fiction that if you supply a new safer method everyone will use it. For gods sake, the simplest of concepts like the stack protector took nearly 1…

> This is less "On Rust" and more "On accepting a rewrite of any tool into OpenBSD, on the merits of memory safety alone".

If people wanted memory safety so much, they could have done that years ago with Java

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#117

Post by swsieber » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

bsdubernerd wrote: post #103

It also doesn't help that Rust keeps on pushing on the idea that "static linking is the only way to go". This is another cargo-cult which I wish didn't end up being engrained so deep in the toolchain because while it has some merits, it also has significant drawbacks of a typical unix distribution. Static linking might be good for folks distributing a single server binary over a fleet of machines (pretty much like Go…

Generics in Rust makes this difficult, not to mention the lack of a stable ABI. I would think it's still possible, but I'm not sure just how much easier static linking is over dynamic linking.

There has been work done on using sscache for cross crate build artifact caching to reduce the footprint when building many binaries.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#118

Post by gdy » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #8

> I wasn't implying. I was stating a fact. There has been no attempt to move the smallest parts of the ecosystem, to provide replacements for base POSIX utilities. This is in fact incorrect--there is a project aiming to build all of the coreutils in Rust ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils ). More to the point: while I do concur in the conclusion that Rust shouldn't be a part of the OpenBSD base system, the gatekee…

>the gatekeeping implied here is really toxic

The words 'gatekeeping' and 'toxic' are toxic.

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#119

Post by sbt567 » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #55

ape4 wrote: post #4

Rust is good at preventing memory leaks. It doesn't matter (as much) for a command line utility that runs for one second then exits. Of course, there are now utilities written in Rust. https://github.com/samuela/rustybox

(Rust does not guarantee the prevention of memory leaks, to be clear)

can you elaborate please?

Re: Re: Integrating "safe" languages into OpenBSD? (2017)

#120

Post by gmueckl » Sun, May 03, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

bsdubernerd wrote: post #103

It also doesn't help that Rust keeps on pushing on the idea that "static linking is the only way to go". This is another cargo-cult which I wish didn't end up being engrained so deep in the toolchain because while it has some merits, it also has significant drawbacks of a typical unix distribution. Static linking might be good for folks distributing a single server binary over a fleet of machines (pretty much like Go…

The rationale is that rust can only give any guarantees at all if the resulting binary is self-contained. A shared library swap can break everything that the compiler guaranteed during compilation. This fits nicely with the generally restrictive mindset of the rust designers.