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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

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Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#31

Post by pizlonator »

eptcyka wrote: post #17
pizlonator wrote: post #13

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift. Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

The C ABI can already be used, it comes with all the existing safety guarantees that C will provide. Isn’t this as good as C?

It is as good as C.

It's also as bad as C.

I'm saying that the chasm to cross is a safe ABI.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#32

Post by system2 »

canadiantim wrote: post #25
system2 wrote: post #11

Why am I hearing about Rust a lot these days? Did anything significant happen?

AI has made it exceptionally easy to program with. I've switched to using Rust from Python simply because of AI development

Really? You think AI writes better Rust than Python? Can you give me some examples? I strictly code Django, and Claude Code is really good at following my lead with it.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#33

Post by nekiwo »

Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#35

Post by elteto »

pizlonator wrote: post #30
elteto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge. Wait, Rust can already communicate using the C ABI. In fact, it offers exactly the same capabilities as C++ in this regard (dynamic linking).

That's an unsafe ABI.

As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be.

I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there.

There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#36

Post by elteto »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #27
ahartmetz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic linking is also great for compile time of debug builds. If a large library or application is split up into smaller shared libraries, ones unaffected by changes don't need to be touched at all. Runtime dynamic linking has a small overhead, but it's several orders of magnitude faster than compile-time linking, so not a problem in debug builds.

for developer turnaround time, it is huge. we explicitly do not statically link Ardour because as developers we are in the edit-compile-debug cycle all day every day, and speeding up the link step (which dynamic linking does dramatically, especially with parallel linkers like lld) is a gigantic improvement to our quality of life and productivity.

A common pattern is dynamic linking for development and static linking for production-ready releases.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#37

Post by jjmarr »

pizlonator wrote: post #13

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift. Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

C++ ABI stability is the main reason improvements to the language get rejected.

You cannot change anything that would affect the class layout of something in the STL. For templated functions where the implementation is in the header, ODR means you can't add optimizations later on.

Maybe this was OK in the 90s when companies deleted the source code and laid off the programmers once the software was done, but it's not a feature Rust should ever support or guarantee.

The "stable ABI" is C functions and nothing else for a very good reason.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#38

Post by edelbitter »

One particular chasm to keep an eye on, possibly even more relevant than Ubuntu using Rust: When it comes to building important stuff, Ubuntu sticks to curl|YOLO|bash instead of trusting trust in their own distributions.

https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#39

Post by jsheard »

nekiwo wrote: post #33

Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...

> the GPL licenses really do protect open source.

They did, until the automatic copyright laundering machine was invented. Pretty much every piece of GPL code ever written is now being magically transmuted into MIT/BSD or proprietary code, and the FSF has no solution.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#40

Post by ozgrakkurt »

eptcyka wrote: post #17
pizlonator wrote: post #13

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift. Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

The C ABI can already be used, it comes with all the existing safety guarantees that C will provide. Isn’t this as good as C?

I found c ABI a bit too difficult in rust compared to c or zig. Mainly because of destructors. I am guessing c++ would be difficult in a similar way.

Also unsafe rust has always on strict-aliasing, which makes writing code difficult unless you do it in certain ways.

Having glue libraries like pyo3 makes it good in rust. But that introduces bloat and other issues. This has been the biggest issue I had with rust, it is too hard to write something so you use a dependency. And before you know it, you are bloating out of control

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