91–100 of 312 posts
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...
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Except as you well know, C might not change as fast, but it does change, including the OS ABI. Those folks think it doesn't.
> Except as you well know, C might not change as fast, but it does change, including the OS ABI. I don't know that. Here's what I know: the most successful OSes have stable OS ABIs. And their market share is positively correlated with the stability of their ABIs. Most widely used: Windows, which has a famously stable OS ABI. (If you wanted to be contrarian you could say that it doesn't because the kernel ABI is not s…
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...
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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", bu…
Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.…
I think we all agree that it would be a huge deal.
> - So long as this problem isn't fixed, the upside of using Rust to replace a lot of the load bearing stuff in an OS is much lower than it should be to justify the effort. This point is debatable for sure, but your arguments don't address it.
As you point out, this is the debatable part, and I'm not sure I get your justification here.
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...
Aren't the versions of Rust in stable Linux distributions like, a century old? Or at least they were last I checked what Debian and Ubuntu LTS were distributing. I think it's because they don't like static linking.
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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.
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In my view, this is a good thing. As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell. Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.
> As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell. I mean yeah that's bad. > Rust preventing this makes my life so much better. I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions…
Firstly, of course you could.
Secondly, you don't even need to, as NixOS shows.
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In my view, this is a good thing. As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell. Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.
> As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell. I mean yeah that's bad. > Rust preventing this makes my life so much better. I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions…
Rust supports ABI compatibility if everyone is on the same compiler version.
That means you can have a distributed caching architecture for your billion line monorepo where everyone can compile world at all times because they share artifacts. Google pioneered this for C++ and doesn't need to care about ABI as a result.
What Rust does not support is a team deciding they don't want to upgrade their toolchains and still interoperate with those that do. Or random copy and pasting of `.so` files you don't know the provenance of. Everyone must be in sync.
In my opinion, this is a reasonable constraint. It allows Rust to swap out HashMap implementations. In contrast, C++ map types are terrible for performance because they cannot be updated for stability reasons.
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Aren't the versions of Rust in stable Linux distributions like, a century old? Or at least they were last I checked what Debian and Ubuntu LTS were distributing. I think it's because they don't like static linking.
Hasn’t the right way to install rust has always been using rust up? I am an Ubuntu user and never once tried apt for rust.