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Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

lore.kernel.org

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Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#151

Post by jlarocco »

detaro wrote: post #113
jlarocco wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see people be so nonchalant about potentially killing off smaller platforms like this. As more barriers to entry are added, competition is going to decrease, and the software ecosystem is going to keep getting worse. First you need a lib C, now you need lib C and Rust, ... But no doubt it's a great way for the big companies funding Rust development to undermine smaller players...

It's kind of funny to see f-ing HPE with 60k employees somehow being labeled as the poor underdog that should be supported by the open-source community for free and can't be expected to take care of software running on their premium hardware for banks etc by themselves.

I think you misread my comment because I didn't say anything like that.

In any case HPE may have 60k employees but they're still working to create a smaller platform.

It actually demonstrates the point I was making. If a company with 60k employees can't keep up then what chance do startups and smaller companies have?

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#152

Post by veber-alex »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #75
monkeyelite wrote: post #29

How does this help me as a user of git?

The developers of git will continue to be motivated to contribute to it. (This isn’t specific to Rust, but rather the technical choices of OSS probably aren’t generally putting the user at the top of the priority list.)

I am pretty sure that developers motivated to contribute code benefits end users plenty.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#153

Post by veber-alex »

IshKebab wrote: post #58
monkeyelite wrote: post #29

How does this help me as a user of git?

In future it might be more reliable and faster, maybe with more features. But we probably won't see any effect for 10 years or so.

10 years? are they going to contribute 1 line of a code a day or something?

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#154

Post by saltcured »

bloppe wrote: post #132
saltcured wrote: post #127

Is this a bit of chickens coming home to roost as far as developer culture forgetting how to work with cross-compiling toolchains? When I started my career, it was common understanding that the developer may be manipulating sourcecode on a different system and/or platform than where it will be executed. Our source control, editing, compilation, and execution was understood to happen in different computational spaces,…

Actually, the Rust toolchain makes cross-compiling way easier than any other fully-compiled language I've ever used. There are like 100 different platforms you can target by just setting the `--target` flag, and they all pretty much just work on any host platform. Sounds like the real issue is that some Git developers have ancient, rigid requirements for their own development machines.

Others have said Rust does not support NonStop.

But, my point is you shouldn't even have to cross-compile Git to a platform like NonStop in order to develop NonStop apps. So the portability of Rust shouldn't even matter here. The app developer should be able to run their Git commands on a supported platform and cross-compile their own app to NonStop.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#155

Post by oreally »

motorest wrote: post #77
bArray wrote: post #54

Maybe I'm just old and moany, and I need to step aside for bigger and better things such as Rust. But. Now rather than needing to understand just C to work on Git/kernel, you now need to also know Rust. The toolchain complexity is increasing, and the mix of these languages increases the barrier to entry. I'm highly invested into Git, having learned the tooling and having a significant number of projects constructed w…

> Now rather than needing to understand just C to work on Git/kernel, you now need to also know Rust. I'm yet to know a single software engineer who isn't well versed on multiple programming languages. This is not a problem.

Except now these software engineers have to code switch between languages.

Could you software engineers stop making things harder for yourselves and playing this meaningless flex of a status game, and you know, focus on something tangible, meaningful, instead of adding more bureaucracy?

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#156

Post by maximilianburke »

steveklabnik wrote: post #68
maximilianburke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they can resurrect the C backend for LLVM and run that through their proprietary compilers? It's probably not straightforward but the users of NonStop hardware have a lot of money so I'm sure they could find a way.

Given that the maintainer previously said they had tried to pay to get GCC and LLVM ported multiple times, all of which failed, money doesn’t seem to have helped.

I mean at one point I had LLVM targeting Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii so I'm sure it's possible, it just needs some imagination and elbow grease :)

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#158

Post by fuhsnn »

delusional wrote: post #39

It seems unwise, to me, to tie the life of a project as fundamental, and conceptually simple, as git to a compiler and runtime as complicated as rust. The beauty of the unsafety of C is partially that it's pretty easy to spin up a compiler on a new platform. The same cannot be said of Rust.

As a practical example, the latest Git version can be compiled by an extremely simple (8K lines of C) C compiler[1] without modification and pass the entire test suite. Gonna miss the ability to make this claim.

[1] https://github.com/fuhsnn/widcc

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#159

Post by hedgehog »

uecker wrote: post #91
hedgehog wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is often under appreciated by people who haven't worked in security how hard high quality C is in practice.

We might also have different priorities. I do not care too much that google and apple want to lock down their smartphone spyware and sales platforms. The supply chain risks and maintenance burden imposed onto me by the Rust ecosystem are much more of an concern.

I don't know what this has to do with locking down phones, but I do appreciate not getting compromised just for cloning a repo or opening my laptop at a coffee shop.

Re: Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system

#160

Post by TuxSH »

1718627440 wrote: post #142
jcrben wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, you may not be aware that C makes it relatively easy to create https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow which are a major source of security vulnerabilities. This is one of the best reasons to rewrite software in Rust or any other more safe by default language.

This doesn't matter at all for programs like Git. Any non-free standing program running on a modern OS on modern hardware trying to access memory its not supposed to will be killed by the OS. This seams to be the more reasonable security-boundary then relying on the language implementation to just not issue code, that does illegal things. Yeah sure, memory-safety is nice for debuggibility and being more confident in…

Not quite the best example, since Git usually has unrestricted file access and network access through HTTP/SSH, any kind of RCE would be disastrous if used for data exfiltration, for instance.

If you want a better example, take distributed database software: behind DMZ, and the interesting code paths require auth.

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