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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

#111

Post by aapoalas »

bbkane wrote: post #3

Really good references to "crossing the chasm" between early adopter needs and mainstream needs. In addition to the Ubuntu coreutils use case, I wonder what other chasms Rust is attempting to cross. I know Rust for Linux (though I think that's still relegated to drivers?) and automotive (not sure where that is).

If you want to take a look at some of the "big drivers", the Project Goals[1] is the right place. These are goals proposed by the community and the language developers put together, they are not explicit milestones or must-haves, but they do serve as a guideline to what the project tries to put its time and effort on.

[1]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#112

Post by aapoalas »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #79
School-Cotton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust does not even have a specification Neither do most programming languages. > You are lucky if current version, compiles two years old code! That's not true.

> Neither do most programming languages. My favorite nemesis and friend JavaScript does, which always gives me a laugh. Such a mess of a wonderful language.

You and me both; never change you beautiful bastard of a language <3

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#113

Post by theamk »

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...

When people say "curl|bash", this usually means secondary fetches, random system config changes, likely adding stuff to user's .bashrc

But it's not quite that bad in this particular case - they are fetching pre-built static toolchain, and running old-school install script, just like in 1990s. The social convention for those is quite safer.

(Although I agree, it is pretty ironic that they prefer this to using ppa or binary packaged into deb...)

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#114

Post by red-iron-pine »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #75
Wobbles42 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are mid level and junior developers being hired anywhere for any reason right now? I don't mean specifically rust developers. I mean software developers.

Sure. There was an article a week or two ago about IBM aggressively hiring juniors. Of course the fact that is noteworthy probably means something in itself....

IBM is also not known for holding on to bodies -- IBM layoff stories abound.

a glut of junior hires now does not a pretty picture make in the long-term sense

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#115

Post by pizlonator »

at_compile_time wrote: post #110
pizlonator wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding: Even if everyone uses the same toolchain, but someone changes the code for a module and recompiles, then you're in UB land unless everyone who depends on that recompiles Am I wrong?

If your key is a hash of the code and its dependencies, for a given toolchain and target, then any change to the code, its dependencies, the toolchain or target will result in a new key unique to that configuration. Though I am not familiar with these distributed caching systems so I could be overlooking something.

That's not the issue I'm worried about

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#116

Post by pizlonator »

staticassertion wrote: post #95
pizlonator wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> - 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 was cheap, then maybe you could say, "who cares".

Unfortunately memory isn't cheap these days

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#117

Post by Gigachad »

pizlonator wrote: post #44
jjmarr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#118

Post by dabinat »

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.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#119

Post by h4kunamata »

Ubuntu used to be the distro to go do, used to.

- SNAP which is only managed and supported by them

- Tried to reinvent the wheel with sudo-rs

- They are heavily focused into cloud, servers and business

- Following the Rust hype train

I used Ubuntu for 13y or so, it is a Windows within Linux world. Bloated, kernel panic, heavy, privacy issues.

Debian still the king to be used as servers, Mint Cinnamon is the king for desktop, gaming, video editing, 3D design, coding,it just works.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#120

Post by Qem »

h4kunamata wrote: post #119

Ubuntu used to be the distro to go do, used to. - SNAP which is only managed and supported by them - Tried to reinvent the wheel with sudo-rs - They are heavily focused into cloud, servers and business - Following the Rust hype train I used Ubuntu for 13y or so, it is a Windows within Linux world. Bloated, kernel panic, heavy, privacy issues. Debian still the king to be used as servers, Mint Cinnamon is the king for…

> Mint Cinnamon is the king for desktop

Mint LMDE great too. Builds upon a Debian base, instead of Ubuntu.

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