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Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

android.googlesource.com

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Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#91

Post by the8472 »

ModernMech wrote: post #64
fouric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that Zig will still end up eclipsing Rust - not because it's a "more powerful" language, but because it's much easier to learn. Lower barriers of entry seem to matter more than mere "power" - see Common Lisp's multi-decade feature lead being ignored, and Python leapfrogging other more capable languages (Common Lisp) or equally capable ones that came first (Ruby) due to ease-of-use.

Rust isn't that hard to learn. I teach it to college sophomores who only know Java, and within 2-3 months I have them writing parsers and interpreters in Rust. In fact these students are requesting our courses to be taught in Rust, and have never heard of Zig. I think that while the language is a little complicated, this is tempered by how nice the tooling is. I consider the borrow checker to be my TA, as it actually…

> this is tempered by how nice the tooling is.

It's fairly mixed. Compiler warnings and errors are great. IDE integration is improving. CPU profiling with perf/hotspot is fine, albeit memory-hungry. Debugging and memory profiling is still bad compared to java.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#92

Post by cogman10 »

est31 wrote: post #83
rkangel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that they can apply much more pressure to the Bluetooth chip vendor. The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung). That gets them the leverage to get the chip vendor to do what they want.

> The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung) Why does Samsung have smaller buying power than Apple? Doesn't Samsung sell more phones than them? Or is it because while Samsung sells more phones in total, Apple still has the most successful single models?

I'd imagine lots of reasons. Apple has the hardware guys to design whatever chip they need. They also have a mountain of reserve capital (Something like $1 trillion I believe?). Further, Apple's closed ecosystem means that if you want them to sell them your hardware you have to conform to their standards.

With Samsung and android, it's a different story. There are many android vendors and the people producing the Bluetooth chips are selling to many of them (broadcom). Samsung has the ability to make their own chips, but to get everything working flawlessly they not only have to make their chips awesome but also improve the android driver stack to work with their new awesome chips. That stack has to also be compatible with the other bluetooth manufactures on the market making it a harder change to make.

In other words, with apple and a vendor, there are pretty much just the 2 parties involved which control everything. With Samsung and vendor it's not just them but also the likes of google and other bluetooth vendors that can get in the way of really fixing things.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#93

Post by zozbot234 »

moldavi wrote: post #80
ModernMech wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust isn't that hard to learn. I teach it to college sophomores who only know Java, and within 2-3 months I have them writing parsers and interpreters in Rust. In fact these students are requesting our courses to be taught in Rust, and have never heard of Zig. I think that while the language is a little complicated, this is tempered by how nice the tooling is. I consider the borrow checker to be my TA, as it actually…

I'd imagine given another language (e.g. Python), they'd learn a lot faster and be a lot more prodictive throughout the course.

Python is way too ad-hoc to be a good teaching language in a professional context. It's designed to teach kids and first-time coders, as an alternative to BASIC.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#94

Post by izacus »

seanalltogether wrote: post #28
mondoshawan wrote: post #2

I know the guy that heads up the team that did this work -- he and I spent 2+ years fighting Broadcom's old, god-awful bluetooth code. Our whole team used to play what-if games about replacing the thing while massive code dumps came in from vendors, making the task ever larger. Zach, if you're reading this, HUGE kudos to holding the line in replacing that, and double kudos for doing it in a verifiable, sane language!

Any insight into why Apple seems to have a much better bluetooth stack? I do a lot of BLE development that has to work cross platform, and we see constant GATT connection issues on android compared to almost none on ios.

They have less hardware variability and also their bluetooth stack is still quite buggy but everyone works around their bugs on device side due to popularity.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#95

Post by steveklabnik »

zozbot234 wrote: post #79
kevincox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer is yes. Most C++ projects would be better served by Rust. However there are many caveats: - I think that C++ devs are still more numerous than Rust devs. - There are many excellent C++ libraries that don't yet have great Rust bindings. Furthermore it is unlikely that template-heavy libraries will ever be easy to use from Rust. - C++ is supported on more platforms. - C++ is more powerful. (Particula…

Meta-programming needs in Rust are addressed by macros. There's not really anything missing there compared to what C++ does via templates.

IMHO, you're a bit too far in the other direction; there are areas where we've been working on actively improving, and there are still some things that C++ folks really miss in Rust. Doesn't mean we'll add all of them, of course, but there is desire for more, for good reasons.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#97

Post by kllrnohj »

pjmlp wrote: post #51

Nice to see this. Sadly the Android team, while taking this safety steps, it keeps using unsafe C userspace for NDK APIs. Security is as good as the weakest link.

> Sadly the Android team, while taking this safety steps, it keeps using unsafe C userspace for NDK APIs.

You phrase this as a negative but it's overwhelmingly a positive. Imagine how difficult it'd be to write an app using the NDK in Rust if the NDK had been C++ instead. The C ABI remains by far the most portable & common target. Everything can call it.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#98

Post by steveklabnik »

bluGill wrote: post #78
steveklabnik wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust does not have classes, strictly speaking, though you can define methods on structs. https://crates.io/crates/cxx is the simplest way to do an integration. It is slightly more work than "just plop in" but it's not incredibly difficult. It's harder than mixing C and C++ together, but then again, almost no pairings of languages are that easy.

Then C++ doesn't have classes either, you can put methods on structs though. Rust people keep saying there are not classes, but all a class needs it the ability to put methods on structs. Private access to some of the internals is often useful, but doesn't need to be enforced by the compiler.

I mean, C++ has the "class" and "struct" keywords for a reason. (they are very similar, Rust structs are closer to "struct" than "class" though) There are a lot more things going on with C++ classes than syntax sugar for functions that have access to "this."

Also, while not in C++, in many languages, classes imply heap allocation, where structs do not.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#99

Post by oriolid »

est31 wrote: post #83
rkangel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that they can apply much more pressure to the Bluetooth chip vendor. The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung). That gets them the leverage to get the chip vendor to do what they want.

> The buying power that Apple has for designing in a particular chip is much bigger than any individual Android manufacturer (even Samsung) Why does Samsung have smaller buying power than Apple? Doesn't Samsung sell more phones than them? Or is it because while Samsung sells more phones in total, Apple still has the most successful single models?

It's because Samsung can get away with selling total garbage. I work on an audio-related app, and a huge majority of the hacks in the app to work around bugs in phones are for different Samsung models. Still more than half of our users keep buying them.

Re: Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

#100

Post by [deleted] »

rektide wrote: post #20

Why not BlueZ, that everyone else uses? Android feels like the land of Not Invented Here sometimes, to me. There might be good reasons, but often it feels like it's just Google trying to insure Android is as incompatible / different as possible from everything else that runs Linux. It doesn't help that almost none of the ChromeOS / Android subsystems or tools have not made it to any mainstream / regular Linux. They r…

[deleted]
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