Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

veber-alex wrote: post #153

IshKebab wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well it would probably take at least 5 years to rewrite all of Git in Rust (git-oxide is 5 years old and far from finished). Then another few years to see novel features, then a year or two to actually get the release.

Btw 10 lines of code per day is a typical velocity for full time work, given it's volunteers 1 line per day might not be as crazy as you think.

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

#202

Post by striking » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:27 PM UTC

1718627440 wrote: post #144

striking wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the code is brittle to change, it must not have been particularly safe in the first place, right? And if it's well-tested, maybe that condition is achieved by the use of a test suite which could verify the changes are safe too?

A test will never catch every bug, otherwise it's a proof, and any change has the probability to introduce a new bug, irregardless of how careful you are. Thus, changing correct code will eventually result in incorrect code.

I'm not sure if that's how probability works.

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

#203

Post by Yoric » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:31 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #190

Rust suffers from the same problems that functional programming languages suffer from: deep learning curve and high complexity. The high complexity is intended to push more runtime errors back to compile time, but boy does that mean the language pays for it. Rust is a tire fire of complexity. For these reasons I believe it is not a good idea. The kernel also sort of rejected Rust. The kernel is complex enough without…

That's... an interesting point of view.

I personally find functional programming languages, including Rust, much clearer than C or Go, in particular because you can offload much information onto the compiler. The example of Serde feels a bit weird, because I don't think I've ever encountered issues with Serde code, while almost 100% of the times I've used Go in production, I've needed to debug through Go's Unmarshal and its... interesting implementation.

Also, last time I checked, the kernel didn't reject Rust. There was a conflict between two specific developers on the best place to store some headers, which is slightly different.

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

#204

Post by jlarocco » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #169

jlarocco wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> If a company with 60k employees can't keep up then what chance do startups and smaller companies have? They build on open source infrastructure like LLVM, which a smaller company will probably be doing anyway.

Sure, but let's not pretend that doesn't kill diversity and entrench a few big players.

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

#205

Post by alfiedotwtf » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #190

Rust suffers from the same problems that functional programming languages suffer from: deep learning curve and high complexity. The high complexity is intended to push more runtime errors back to compile time, but boy does that mean the language pays for it. Rust is a tire fire of complexity. For these reasons I believe it is not a good idea. The kernel also sort of rejected Rust. The kernel is complex enough without…

> The high complexity is intended to push more runtime errors back to compile time

I would almost say that the ergonomics of allowing this is almost as important as the borrow checker!

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

#206

Post by dang » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:40 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #192

The title is a bit of a misnomer. Rust will become mandatory in the build system, not mandatory for future patches.

Thanks! I've added that to the title above. If it's somehow inaccurate, we can change it again.

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

#207

Post by gre » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

jcrben wrote: post #101

sebtron wrote: post #98

I am curious, what is the reason behind introducing Rust in Git? I am not familiar with Git development, I am just a user. But my impression is that it is already a complete tool that won't require much new code to be written. Fixes and improvements here and there, sure, but that does not seem like a good reason to start using a new language. In contrast, I understand why adding it to e.g. Linux development makes sen…

C is unsafe.

https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs

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

#208

Post by aw1621107 » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #193

nayak wrote: post #140

This series was in response to another thread [1] which wanted to make rust mandatory in an upcoming release. The authors proposal was to instead take the middle ground and use rust as an optional dependency until a later point of time where it becomes mandatory. The later point of time was decided based on when rust support lands in gcc, which would make things smoother, since platforms which support gcc would also…

The GCC compiler collection has been hit and miss though. Nobody uses gcj for example. I sort of doubt that they'll be able to implement a good compiler for a language that doesn't even have a standard without that implementation going wildly out of date in the future, just like what happened with Java.

There's two different methods by which Rust support can be added to GCC: adding a Rust frontend to GCC and adding a GCC backend to the Rust compiler (rustc_codegen_gcc). The latter approach would not be (as?) susceptible to implementation divergence as an independent frontend.

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

#209

Post by testdelacc1 » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

oreally wrote: post #179

IshKebab wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you aren't a software engineer based on this comment, but the difference between programming languages is tangible and meaningful. It isn't like human languages where they're mostly basically the same and achieve the same thing. And code switching between languages is not hard at all.

It's hilarious that you can assume such a thing just by a couple of words on the internet. Or maybe I'm not a 'software engineer' by your standards because unlike your closed group of SWEs I'm a lot less focused on resume padding and keeping my codebase sane and not exploding in complexity. I should specify - it's hard in that it's troublesome to have to code switch and do a bunch of recall before working on the thin…

I didn’t make the assumption but it sounded like a reasonable assumption based on the pronouns you used. You said “could you software engineers stop making things harder for yourselves.” A reasonable interpretation of this is that you aren’t a software engineer.

Reinforced softly by the rest of your comment not being technically sound. Adding a second language that is meaningfully different in its strengths and weaknesses isn’t “bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy is more like “sign a CLA before you can contribute”.

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

#210

Post by oldsecondhand » Sat, Sep 20, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

djha-skin wrote: post #193

nayak wrote: post #140

This series was in response to another thread [1] which wanted to make rust mandatory in an upcoming release. The authors proposal was to instead take the middle ground and use rust as an optional dependency until a later point of time where it becomes mandatory. The later point of time was decided based on when rust support lands in gcc, which would make things smoother, since platforms which support gcc would also…

The GCC compiler collection has been hit and miss though. Nobody uses gcj for example. I sort of doubt that they'll be able to implement a good compiler for a language that doesn't even have a standard without that implementation going wildly out of date in the future, just like what happened with Java.

Since OpenJDK was released there isn't much point maintaining GCJ.