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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

#151

Post by hamandcheese »

rlpb wrote: post #150
hamandcheese wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS "suffers" from this. It's really not that bad if you have solid bandwidth. For me it's more than worth the trade off. With a solid connection a major upgrade is still just a couple minutes.

A couple of minutes at the moment that is, with dynamic linking everywhere. What will it become when everything is statically linked?

I think you misunderstand my point. Nix basically forces dynamic linking to be more like static linking. So changing a low level library causes ~everything to redownload.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#152

Post by mr_mitm »

Sytten wrote: post #133
canadiantim wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Are hallucinations in code generation still a problem? I thought with linters, type checkers, and compilers especially as strict as Rust, LLM agents easily catch their own mistakes. At least that's my experience: the agent writes code, runs linters and compilers, fixes whatever it hallucinated, and I probably get a working solution. I tell it to write unit tests and integration tests and it catches even more of its own mistakes. Not saying that it will always produce code free of bugs, but hallucinations haven't been an issue for me anymore.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#153

Post by mr_mitm »

the_duke wrote: post #58
system2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rust has a very strict type system and an ecosystem that often utilizes the type system well. Many things that would only be caught at runtime in other languages are caught at compile time in Rust, making coding agents iterate until things compile and work well. Rust also has great error messages, which help the agents in fixing compilation errors.

The mandatory error handling of Rust is also an amazing feature for catching bugs at compile time. In Python you never know which exceptions might occur at any given time. That's something I completely underestimated in its usefulness, especially now that I have a programming buddy with infinite stamina handling all these errors for me.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#154

Post by bayindirh »

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem.

Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors.

Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective.

Consider: An end to end signature-enabled, verified, attestable, Linux environment with completely closed source util-linux and userland packages, down to the "ls" and "cd". Deliciously apocalyptic.

We're two stops away from this, and there are no shortage of momentum or funding to enable teh future.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#155

Post by hyperman1 »

choeger wrote: post #145
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.

That would be great, but Rust relies on compile-time monomorphization for efficiency (very much like C++, if you consider templates polymorphic functions/classes). This means that any Rust ABI would have to cater for link-time specialization. I think this should be doable, but it would require a solution that's better than just to move the code generation into the linker. Instead, one would need to carefully consider…

I wonder if we look at it from a too narrow perspective. We use the C ABI because it's the only game in town. We should be aiming for a safe cross language ABI. I'd love to make Rust, C, PHP, Swift, Java and Python easily talk to each other inside 1 process.

It should extend the C ABI with things like strings, arrays, objects with a way to destruct them, and provide some safety guarantees.

As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#156

Post by [deleted] »

miki123211 wrote: post #134
pizlonator wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

[deleted]

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#157

Post by benrutter »

bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

History probably says I'm being naive, but I feel like I don't hate this possibility (hear me out!).

Personally, I'd always choose to use a distribution with open source userland packages and utils, but if closed source alternatives exist and conform to the same specifications (i.e. we get "embrace" without the "extend and extinguish") then I don't mind if a company has closed sourced tech, especially if it'll help there business case, potentially boosting funding for open source linux projects.

Maybe that's all naive, I guess we'll find out if ubuntu really do go for more and more closed source options.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#158

Post by [deleted] »

rhdunn wrote: post #87
pjmlp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Victor Ciura from Microsoft DevDiv has several talks on how this is currently an adoption problem at Microsoft. They have been working around it with DLLs, and COM/WinRT, but still the tooling isn't ideal.

COM is interesting as it implements interfaces using the C++ vtable layout, which can be done in C. Dynamic COM (DCOM) is used to provide interoperability with Visual Basic. You can also access .NET/C# objects/interfaces via COM. It has an interface to allow you to get the type metadata but that isn't necessary. This makes it possible to e.g. get the C#/.NET exception stack trace from a C/C++ application.

[deleted]

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#159

Post by bayindirh »

benrutter wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

History probably says I'm being naive, but I feel like I don't hate this possibility (hear me out!). Personally, I'd always choose to use a distribution with open source userland packages and utils, but if closed source alternatives exist and conform to the same specifications (i.e. we get "embrace" without the "extend and extinguish") then I don't mind if a company has closed sourced tech, especially if it'll help t…

I understand the optimism, but after being burned by what Microsoft did to the Linux community for the last 20+ years, I'll just distance myself more from Ubuntu ecosystem.

When you put Snaps, Juju, uutils, etc. as a list, it all smells like a path to lockdown, not dissimilar to what RedHat did with their "unbranded" patches recently (IBM being IBM, which was unsurprising).

Also, remembering how Canonical worked together with Microsoft on some projects like WSL, which felt like "Surrender servers to Linux, and save the Windows desktop by allowing Linux run as a slave inside a VM" type of deal, I do not trust them a bit.

So, Linux is maturing, but it'll also bring a couple of very big cracks through ecosystem, and it'll be noisy and painful. Personally, I'm on Debian for the last 20+ years, and not planning to move anywhere for now.

I understand that there needs to be an economy, but money is not more important than destroying what we're standing on. Let it be physical like our planet, or virtual like the free software and the culture we built around it.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#160

Post by mrweasel »

staticassertion wrote: post #94
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...

I don't get it. What's the chasm here?

The "issue" isn't that these new tools from Ubuntu is in Rust, that's almost irrelevant. The issue is that they are not the "standard" tools.

If Ubuntus Rust replacements aren't adopted in other distributions, or only in some of them, we get an even more fragmented Linux ecosystem. We've already seen this with the sudo-rs (which really should be called something else). It's a sudo replacement, ideal a one to one replacement, but it's not 100% and for how long? You can also think of the Curl provided by Microsoft Powershell, which isn't actually Curl and only partially provides Curl functionality, but it squats the command name.

Ubuntu might accidentally, or deliberately, create a semi-incompatible parallel Linux environment, like Alpine, but worse.

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