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Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

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Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#111

Post by cynical_german »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #99
cynical_german wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what a weird take to me... C has DECADES of high quality teaching material in form of books, university courses, plenty of which is freely available with a bit of searching. And, if we discount the fact that "buying" a book is such a big hurdle, even more high quality academic text books and papers to boost; anything from embedded on the weirdest platforms, basic parsing, writing compilers, language design, high perf…

> anything from embedded on the weirdest platforms, basic parsing, writing compilers, language design, high performance computing, teaching of algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, whatever All that is language-agnostic and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with C.

Yes, but there is material covering all of those aspects with implementations in C plus libraries plus ecosystem support! From teaching material to real world reference implementations to look at and modify and learn from.

And C maps so directly to so many concepts; it's easy to pick up any of those topics with C; and it being so loose makes it even perfect to explore many of those areas to begin with, since very quickly you're not fighting the language to let you do things.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#112

Post by cynical_german »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #101
cynical_german wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what a weird take to me... C has DECADES of high quality teaching material in form of books, university courses, plenty of which is freely available with a bit of searching. And, if we discount the fact that "buying" a book is such a big hurdle, even more high quality academic text books and papers to boost; anything from embedded on the weirdest platforms, basic parsing, writing compilers, language design, high perf…

> edit2: networking, signal processing, automotive, learning about industry protocols and devices of any sort... I admit there is many great products that are written in C that aren’t going anywhere any time soon, notably SQLite, but there is no reason to write new software in C or C++.

I do, and will, the industry does and will, for at least a few more decades. And I even enjoy doing so (with C; C++ is more forced upon me, but that'll be the case for some time to come)

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#113

Post by im_down_w_otp »

Aurornis wrote: post #98
cbmuser wrote: post #74

I am still waiting for any of the alternative Rust front- or backends to allow me to bootstrap Rust on alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4 which are still lacking Rust support. Originally, the rustc_codegen_gcc project made this promise but never fulfilled it.

> to allow me to bootstrap Rust on alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4 Do you actually use all four of those platforms, or is this an arbitrary threshold for what you consider a complete set of platform support?

They're still common (except for alpha) platforms in some market segment specific corners of embedded development. So, maybe for those purposes?

Though, the trend I'm seeing a lot of is greenfield projects just migrating their MCUs to ARM.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#114

Post by koakuma-chan »

cynical_german wrote: post #111
koakuma-chan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything from embedded on the weirdest platforms, basic parsing, writing compilers, language design, high performance computing, teaching of algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, whatever All that is language-agnostic and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with C.

Yes, but there is material covering all of those aspects with implementations in C plus libraries plus ecosystem support! From teaching material to real world reference implementations to look at and modify and learn from. And C maps so directly to so many concepts; it's easy to pick up any of those topics with C; and it being so loose makes it even perfect to explore many of those areas to begin with, since very qui…

People may learn from material that uses C for illustration purposes, but that won’t prompt them to write their own C. And don’t even mention ecosystem support in C/C++ where developers are notorious for reimplementing everything on their own because there is no package manager.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#115

Post by hedgehog »

cbmuser wrote: post #74

I am still waiting for any of the alternative Rust front- or backends to allow me to bootstrap Rust on alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4 which are still lacking Rust support. Originally, the rustc_codegen_gcc project made this promise but never fulfilled it.

Did they abandon that goal? Last I heard it was still under development.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#116

Post by koakuma-chan »

cynical_german wrote: post #112
koakuma-chan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit2: networking, signal processing, automotive, learning about industry protocols and devices of any sort... I admit there is many great products that are written in C that aren’t going anywhere any time soon, notably SQLite, but there is no reason to write new software in C or C++.

I do, and will, the industry does and will, for at least a few more decades. And I even enjoy doing so (with C; C++ is more forced upon me, but that'll be the case for some time to come)

That’s what I’m saying. By a few decades you and most of those alleged 7 million C/C++ developers will retire and there won’t be anyone to replace them because everyone will be using Rust or Zig or Go.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#117

Post by steveklabnik »

chrisrodrigue wrote: post #108
pornel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interop is already great via PyO3, except when people want to build the Rust part from source, but are grumpy about having to install the Rust compiler. This hack is a Rust compiler back-end. Backends get platform-specific instructions as an input, so non-trivial generated C code won't be portable. Users will need to either get pre-generated platform-specific source, or install the Rust compiler and this back-end…

They are grumpy about having to install the Rust compiler for a good reason. You can’t compile for Rust on Windows without using MSVC via Visual Studio Build Tools, which has a restrictive license.

You can use the GNU ABI instead, if you don't want to use the Visual Studio Build Tools.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#118

Post by estebank »

chrisrodrigue wrote: post #108
pornel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interop is already great via PyO3, except when people want to build the Rust part from source, but are grumpy about having to install the Rust compiler. This hack is a Rust compiler back-end. Backends get platform-specific instructions as an input, so non-trivial generated C code won't be portable. Users will need to either get pre-generated platform-specific source, or install the Rust compiler and this back-end…

They are grumpy about having to install the Rust compiler for a good reason. You can’t compile for Rust on Windows without using MSVC via Visual Studio Build Tools, which has a restrictive license.

https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/installation/windows.html

> When targeting the MSVC ABI, Rust additionally requires an installation of Visual Studio so rustc can use its linker and libraries.

> When targeting the GNU ABI, no additional software is strictly required for basic use. However, many library crates will not be able to compile until the full MSYS2 with MinGW has been installed.

...

> Since the MSVC ABI provides the best interoperation with other Windows software it is recommended for most purposes. The GNU toolchain is always available, even if you don’t use it by default.

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#119

Post by cynical_german »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #114
cynical_german wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is material covering all of those aspects with implementations in C plus libraries plus ecosystem support! From teaching material to real world reference implementations to look at and modify and learn from. And C maps so directly to so many concepts; it's easy to pick up any of those topics with C; and it being so loose makes it even perfect to explore many of those areas to begin with, since very qui…

People may learn from material that uses C for illustration purposes, but that won’t prompt them to write their own C. And don’t even mention ecosystem support in C/C++ where developers are notorious for reimplementing everything on their own because there is no package manager.

"rust import csv-parser" "you've installed 89 packages"

why is my executable 20 mb, not as performant as a 50 kb C file & doesn't build a year later if I try to build with 89 new versions of those packages

obligatory xkcd reference: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png this is what package managers lead to

Re: Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms

#120

Post by shakna »

cbmuser wrote: post #74

I am still waiting for any of the alternative Rust front- or backends to allow me to bootstrap Rust on alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4 which are still lacking Rust support. Originally, the rustc_codegen_gcc project made this promise but never fulfilled it.

"m68k-unknown-linux-gnu" was merged as a Tier-3 target for Rust, wasn't it? [0]

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/458

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