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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

#131

Post by squirrellous »

Gigachad wrote: post #117
pizlonator wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if Rust wants to evolve even more aggressively than C++ evolves, then that is a chasm that needs to be crossed. In lots of domains, having a language that doesn't change very much, or that only changes very carefully with backcompat being taken super seriously, is more important than the memory safety guarantees Rust offers.

Isn’t this solution solved by just compiling your libraries with your main app code? Computers are fast enough that this shouldn’t be a huge issue.

This assumes a lot:

- the same entity has access to the source of both the library and the main app

- library and main app share the same build tooling

And even if that’s the case, you have the problem of end users accidentally using different versions of the main app and the library and getting unexpected UB.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#132

Post by opan »

LoganDark wrote: post #93
edelbitter wrote: post #38

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.

Debian had a new stable release 45 days ago. For now I would imagine things aren't too old there. Although a friend of mine recently ran into some ancient packages on Mint, so maybe Mint/Ubuntu are oddly behind Debian Stable right now for some things.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#133

Post by Sytten »

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

From my experience at our startup, AI is still pretty shit at Rust. It largely fails to understanding lifetime, Pin, async, etc. Basically anything moderately complex. It hallucinates a lot more in general than JS for comparable codebase size (in the 250k lines range).

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#134

Post by miki123211 »

pizlonator wrote: post #116
staticassertion wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - It would be a big deal if Rust did have a safe dynamic linking ABI. Someone should do it. That's the main point I'm making. I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting. 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…

This might end up being the forcing function (quoting myself from another reply in this discussion): > It can't be that replacing 20 C/C++ shared objects with 20 Rust shared objects results in 20 copies of the Rust standard library and other dependencies that those Rust libraries pull in. But, today, that is what happens. For some situations, this is too much of a memory usage regression to be tolerable. If memory wa…

Can you even make the standard library dynamically linked in the C way??

In C, a function definition usually corresponds 1-to-1 to a function in object code. In Rust, plenty of things in the stdlib are generic functions that effectively get a separate implementation for each type you use them with.

If there's a library that defines Foo but doesn't use VecFoo>, and there are 3 other libraries in your program that do use that type, where should the Vec functions specialized for Foo reside? How do languages like Swift (which is notoriously dynamically-linked) solve this?

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#136

Post by overfeed »

dabinat wrote: post #118

I think an issue hindering Rust adoption is ecosystem immaturity. So many crates are pre-1.0, or just basic wrappers around a C library. There are good crates for core things like cryptography, but finding something production-ready for something like SAML is tough.

> There are good crates for core things like cryptography

Speaking of cryptography, I've given up on setting up a Termux Python dev environment on an old Arm tablet, because some package has a dependency on the 'cryptography' module, which apparently requires the whole Rust toolchain to build. In a Python project. On a platform with limited storage. The documentation suggests pre-built binaries are an option, but I couldn't figure it out the last few times. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#137

Post by cryptonector »

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.

Eh, some people can work on moving to Rust, while others work on adding dynamic linking to Rust.

Or maybe we can some how get used to living with static linking. (I don't think so, but many seem to think so in spite of my advice to the contrary!)

Another possibility is to use IPC as the dynamic linking boundary of sorts, but this will consume lots more memory, and as is stated elsewhere in this thread, memory ain't cheap no more.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#138

Post by MindSpunk »

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.

What is a safe ABI? An ABI can't control whether one or both parties either end of the interface are honest.

You can't have safe dynamic linking, dynamic linking requires you to trust the library you load with no ability to verify.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#139

Post by bigstrat2003 »

bluejekyll wrote: post #45
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...

A discussion on licenses will go sideways very quickly. GPL does limit the adoption of software in certain environments. So it really depends on your goals. Do you want an OSS project that will be useable by everyone (including corporations) or do you want to guarantee that the software will always be OSS and guarantee that Corporations can’t benefit from it without contributing back (potentially requiring them to op…

> MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open.

Sure it does. The original software will always remain open. It isn't like people can somehow take that away.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#140

Post by bigstrat2003 »

moomin wrote: post #104

.NET has a _huge_ platform library and you know what? It’s a pleasure. So many things are just the standard way of doing things. When things are done weirdly, you can usually get a majority in favour of standardising it. Yes, there’s always a couple of people who really push the boat out…

Yeah, IMO the small standard library in Rust is a big mistake, one of the few the language has made. When push comes to shove the stdlib is the only thing you can count on always being there. It's incredibly valuable to have more tools in the stdlib even if they aren't the best versions out there (for example, even if I normally use requests in Python urllib2 has saved my bacon before), and it doesn't hurt anything to have them there.
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