Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

lore.kernel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 433 posts

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#261

Post by saghm »

kazinator wrote: post #122
saghm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point maybe it's time to let them solve the problem they've created for themselves by insisting on a closed C compiler in 2025.

[flagged]

>> insisting on a closed C compiler in 2025.

> Everything should use one compiler, one run-time and one package manager.

If you think that calling out closed C compilers is somehow an argument for a single toolchain for all things, I doubt there's anything I can do to help educate you about why this isn't the case. If you do understand and are choosing to purposely misinterpret what I said, there are a lot of much stronger arguments you could make to support your point than that.

Even ignoring all of that, there's a much larger point that you've kind of glossed over here by:

> The shitheads who insist on using alternative compilers and platforms don't deserve tools

There's frequently discussion around the the expectations between open source project maintainers and users, and in the same way that users are under no obligation to provide compensation for projects they use, projects don't have any obligations to provide support indefinitely for any arbitrary set of circumstances, even if they happen to for a while. Maintainers sometimes will make decisions weighing tradeoffs between supporting a minority of users or making a technical change they feel will help them maintain the project better in the long-term differently than the users will. It's totally valid to criticize those decisions on technical grounds, but it's worth recognizing that these types of choices are inevitable, and there's nothing specific about C or Rust that will change that in the long run. Even with a single programming language within a single platform, the choice of what features to implement or not implement could make or break whether a tool works for someone's specific use case. At the end of the day, there's a finite amount of work people spend on a given project, and there needs to be a decision about what to spend it on.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#262

Post by dabinat »

djha-skin wrote: post #190

Rust suffers from the same problems that functional programming languages suffer from: deep learning curve and high complexity. The high complexity is intended to push more runtime errors back to compile time, but boy does that mean the language pays for it. Rust is a tire fire of complexity. For these reasons I believe it is not a good idea. The kernel also sort of rejected Rust. The kernel is complex enough without…

C is simple. Good, fast, secure C is complex.

Rust has a higher initial learning curve than C. But the gap between bare-minimum Rust and fast and secure Rust is much smaller than with C.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#263

Post by saghm »

altairprime wrote: post #120
saghm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally a test of how people will react, so yes, finding out if people will react negatively would be exactly the point of doing the test in the first place. Would you prefer that they don't publicize what their follow-up plans would be to try to make it harder to criticize the plans? If you're against the plan, I'm pretty sure that's the exact type of feedback they're looking for, so it would make more sense…

If they’re running the project with a Linus-type approach, they won’t consider backlash to be interesting or relevant, unless it is accompanied by specific statements of impact. Generic examples for any language to explain why: > How dare you! I’m going to boycott git!! Self-identified as irrelevant (objector will not be using git); no reply necessary, expect a permaban. > I don’t want to install language X to build…

That's fair, but I also don't think that nuance somehow makes it less of a "test balloon".

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#264

Post by IshKebab »

nanolith wrote: post #251
pornel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is over 10 years old now. It has a track record of delivering what it promises, and a very satisfied growing userbase. OTOH static analyzers for C have been around for longer than Rust, and we're still waiting for them to disprove Rice's theorem. AI tools so far are famous for generating low-quality code, and generating bogus vulnerability reports. They may eventually get better and end up being used to make C c…

The applicability of Rice's theorem with respect to static analysis or abstract interpretation is more complex than you implied. First, static analysis tools are largely pattern-oriented. Pattern matching is how they sidestep undecidability. These tools have their place, but they aren't trying to be the tooling you or the parent claim. Instead, they are more useful to enforce coding style. This can be used to help wi…

Sure it's possible in theory, but how many C codebases actually use formal verification? I don't think I've seen a single one. Git certainly doesn't do anything like that.

I have occasionally used CBMC for isolated functions, but that must already put me in the top 0.1% of formal verification users.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#265

Post by thayne »

bArray wrote: post #54

Maybe I'm just old and moany, and I need to step aside for bigger and better things such as Rust. But. Now rather than needing to understand just C to work on Git/kernel, you now need to also know Rust. The toolchain complexity is increasing, and the mix of these languages increases the barrier to entry. I'm highly invested into Git, having learned the tooling and having a significant number of projects constructed w…

Look at it from the other angle, there are many developers (myself included), especially younger developers who would much prefer developing rust to c, and for at least some of them, don't want to learn how to write c (including how to avoid undefined behavior).

> I've written my own Git clients and have built a web server around Git repositories. I don't want to lose the hack-ability of Git.

How does the git project using rust inhibit your ability to do any of that?

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#266

Post by eYrKEC2 »

mhh__ wrote: post #216
sebtron wrote: post #98

I am curious, what is the reason behind introducing Rust in Git? I am not familiar with Git development, I am just a user. But my impression is that it is already a complete tool that won't require much new code to be written. Fixes and improvements here and there, sure, but that does not seem like a good reason to start using a new language. In contrast, I understand why adding it to e.g. Linux development makes sen…

git feels complete until you use a tool like jj or git-branchless (latter of which has things like in-memory merges in rust)

Or if you use its predecessor, bitkeeper.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#267

Post by uecker »

IshKebab wrote: post #258
uecker wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not what I said, but memory safety is certainly not anything which is a high priority for my own security. I still think memory safety is important and I also think Rust is an interesting language, but... the hype is exaggerated and driven by certain industry interests.

Rust isn't popular just because of memory safety though. I think the memory safety message is maybe a little too loud. It's also a modern language with fantastic tooling, very high quality library ecosystem and a strong type system that reduces the chance of all kinds of bugs. It's obviously not perfect: compile time is ... ok, there aren't any mature GUI toolkits (though that's true of many languages), async Rust ha…

Rust is a nice language, but it pushed too aggressively with the argument of "memory safety" at all cost ignoring other considerations. And Cargo is certainly a disaster even though it may be considered "fantastic tooling" by some. In any case, I do not think it is funny that I now depend on packages without timely security update in my distribution. This makes me less secure.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#268

Post by crote »

kazinator wrote: post #115
antihero wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't these platforms work on getting Rust to support it rather than have our tools limited by what they can consume? https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs

[flagged]

On the other hand: why should the entire open-source world screech to a halt just because some new development is incompatible with the ecosystem of a proprietary niche system developed by a billion-dollar freeloader?

HPE NonStop doesn't need to do anything with Rust, and nobody is forcing them to. They have voluntarily chosen to use an obscure proprietary toolchain instead of contributing to GCC or LLVM like everyone else: they could have gotten Rust support for free, but they believed staying proprietary was more important.

Then they chose to make a third-party project (Git) a crucial part of that ecosystem, without contributing time and effort into maintaining it. It's open source, so this is perfectly fine to do. On the other hand, it also means they don't get a say in how the project is developed, and what direction it will take in the future. But hey, they believed saving a few bucks was more important.

And now it has blown up in their face, and they are trying to control the direction the third-party project is heading by playing the "mission-critical infrastructure" card and claiming that the needs of their handful of users is more important than the millions of non-HPE users.

Right now there are three options available to HPE NonStop users:

1. Fork git. Don't like the direction it is heading? Then just do it yourself. Cheapest option short-term, but it of course requires investing serious developer effort long-term to stay up-to-date, rather than just sending the occasional patch upstream.

2. Port GCC / LLVM. That's usually the direction obscure platforms go. You bite the bullet once, but get to reap the benefits afterwards. From the perspective of the open-source community, if your platform doesn't have GCC support it might as well not exist. If you want to keep freeloading off of it, it's best to stop fighting this part. However, it requires investing developer effort - especially when you want to maintain a proprietary fork due to Business Reasons rather than upstreaming your changes like everyone else.

3. Write your own proprietary snowflake Rust compiler. You get to keep full control, but it'll require a significant developer effort. And you have to "muck around" with Rust, of course.

HPE NonStop and its ecosystem can do whatever it wants, but it doesn't get to make demands just because their myopic short-term business vision suddenly leaves them having to spend effort on maintaining it. This time it is caused by Git adopting Rust, but it will happen again. Next week it'll be something like libxml or openssl or ssh or who-knows-what. Either accept that breakage is inevitable when depending on third-party components, or invest time into staying compatible with the ecosystem.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#269

Post by leftyspook »

Ambroisie wrote: post #183
saltcured wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have said Rust does not support NonStop. But, my point is you shouldn't even have to cross-compile Git to a platform like NonStop in order to develop NonStop apps. So the portability of Rust shouldn't even matter here. The app developer should be able to run their Git commands on a supported platform and cross-compile their own app to NonStop.

I haven't double checked, but my recollection of that story was that they were using Git as part of the operations at runtime, not (just) as a development dependency.

Ah, I see Tom the Genius has moved on from using Subversion for his enterprise JSON DSL

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#270

Post by heavyset_go »

gbnbv wrote: post #246
djha-skin wrote: post #192

The title is a bit of a misnomer. Rust will become mandatory in the build system, not mandatory for future patches.

What does that mean? Is it mandatory for building the build system or also for building the application?

If you want to build the project, you will need a Rust compiler in your toolchain.
Post reply on HN