21–30 of 56 posts
What is this used for? I am interested in contributing
Out of curiosity, how does one become interested in contributing to a thing when one doesn't even know what the thing is?
Seems to consist mostly of a copy of Busybox’s C code auto-translated to Rust using c2rust – resulting in ubiquitous use of raw pointers and `unsafe` for mundane operations. That’s technically “written entirely in Rust”, but not in the way you’d expect… On the other hand, it could serve as a good starting point for a gradual rewrite into idiomatic Rust.
Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this. Once it becomes socially acceptable to use unsafe all over the place in the community, it might be hard to win the user trust back.
Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't blame the language doing the calling for the bug.
Having said that, these translations are still useful as a starting point, not a destination. Think of a case where the external C API is retained, but all the innards are gradually converted to a more idiomatic codebase.
What is this used for? I am interested in contributing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this. Once it becomes socially acceptable to use unsafe all over the place in the community, it might be hard to win the user trust back.
I don't think 1) unsafe will ever become prevalent in the ecosystem nor 2) that unsafe should be seen as anything other than an escape hatch that is sometimes necessary. Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think 1) unsafe will ever become prevalent in the ecosystem nor 2) that unsafe should be seen as anything other than an escape hatch that is sometimes necessary. Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't…
`unsafe` is already very prevalent in the ecosystem and this is a big point of contention. https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/289
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this. Once it becomes socially acceptable to use unsafe all over the place in the community, it might be hard to win the user trust back.
I don't think 1) unsafe will ever become prevalent in the ecosystem nor 2) that unsafe should be seen as anything other than an escape hatch that is sometimes necessary. Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't…
This was the case for the Go compiler (automatic translation from C to Go), and it has worked out well in practice. There are still some vestiges, but it's moving more and more toward idiomatic Go all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think 1) unsafe will ever become prevalent in the ecosystem nor 2) that unsafe should be seen as anything other than an escape hatch that is sometimes necessary. Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't…
> these translations are still useful as a starting point, not a destination. This was the case for the Go compiler (automatic translation from C to Go), and it has worked out well in practice. There are still some vestiges, but it's moving more and more toward idiomatic Go all the time.
For coreutils actually written from scratch, see a more interesting project: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils