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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

#251

Post by tmtvl »

duskdozer wrote: post #246
tmtvl wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eroding user's rights is good if it means users have fewer choices because choice is bad? I suppose it would mean that resources could concentrate in a smaller, more focused set of software, but I really can't see how that would justify the harm caused.

Just think about how easy it would be though - imagine - one single OS, one single version always immediately up to date, one consistent set of installed software, attestation to ensure no adversaries are attempting to modify or install unsupported software, full accurate and thorough analytics, what a dream...

Isn't that what Apple purports to sell? There's also Haiku, but I don't know to what extend it matches that description.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#252

Post by okanat »

moomin wrote: post #104

.NET has a _huge_ platform library and you know what? It’s a pleasure. So many things are just the standard way of doing things. When things are done weirdly, you can usually get a majority in favour of standardising it. Yes, there’s always a couple of people who really push the boat out…

Non-system programmers like to trivialize choices of system programmers yet again. .NET is a GC platform running on a virtual machine. Bytecode compatibility and absolute performance are not that big of a deal on such platforms. You cannot / shouldn't run .NET on deeply embedded systems and bare metal where You want to strip as much standard library as possible and want as little magic in standard library as possible. In a language with big hosted system assumption this causes to runtime to be split and forces developers to define big API boundaries.

The use case of languages like Rust and C++ is that you can use the same compiler to write both bare-metal unhosted code (non-std for bootloaders, microcontrollers and kernels) and hosted code (uses std structures). As a system programmer that crosses the edge between two environments, I would like to share as much code as possible. Having a big standard library with hosted system assumption is a huge issue. In those cases you want the language works 99% the same and can use the same structs / libraries. Sometimes you also want to write non-std code on hosted environments for things like linkers.

Rust isn't even at the level of maturity of C yet in this regard. Rust's std / core is too big for really memory limited microcontrollers (Having a huge baggage of std both causes issues like this for the users and also increases maintenance burden of the maintainers. Rust really wants to break its APIs as little as possible and small standard library is a great way to achieve that. C++ suffered a lot from this and it hampered its adoption for C codebases.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#253

Post by rlpb »

jabl wrote: post #142
staticassertion wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, well yeah, statically linked binaries have that downside. I guess I don't think that's a big deal, but I could maybe imagine on some devices that are heavily constrained that it could be? IDK. Compression is insanely effective.

If Rust and static linking were to become much more popular, Linux distros could adopt some rsync/zsync like binary diff protocol for updates instead of pulling entire packages from scratch.

Even then, they would still need to rebuild massive amounts on updates. That is nice in theory, but see the number of bugs reported in Debian because upstream projects fail to rebuild as expected. "I don't have the exact micro version of this dependency I'm expecting" is one common reason, but there are many others. It's a pretty regular thing, and therefore would be burdensome to distro maintainers."

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#255

Post by rhdunn »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146
rhdunn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COM is interesting as it implements interfaces using the C++ vtable layout, which can be done in C. Dynamic COM (DCOM) is used to provide interoperability with Visual Basic. You can also access .NET/C# objects/interfaces via COM. It has an interface to allow you to get the type metadata but that isn't necessary. This makes it possible to e.g. get the C#/.NET exception stack trace from a C/C++ application.

>Dynamic COM (DCOM) is used to provide interoperability with Visual Basic. DCOM is Distributed COM not Dynamic COM[1]. COM does have an interface for dynamic dispatch called IDispatch[2] which is used for scripting languages like VBScript or JScript. It isn't required for Visual Basic though. VB is compiled and supports early binding to interfaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M... […

Ah yes, that's what I was thinking of. It's been a while since I've worked with COM.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#256

Post by giancarlostoro »

9rx wrote: post #10
giancarlostoro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hate me for this, but... is 20 years of Rust really new? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) I do get what you mean, but Rust has been baking for a decade, finally took off after 10 years of baking, and now that is been repeatedly tried and tested it is eating the world, as some developers suggested it could eventually do so. I however do think this shows a different problem: If nobody wri…

Ideally, but if a project wasn't written with tests at the time then finding a working time machine can be a challenge. If you try to add them later you won't capture all the nuance that went into the original program. After all, if the implementation code was expressive enough to capture that nuance, you'd already have your test suite, so to speak. Tests are written to fill in the details that the rest of the code i…

Tests are written for various goals: integration testing, to prevent regressions, and in the same effort to prevent regressions to protect mission critical / business logic code. If all those nuances are captured by good tests, you arguably have "100%" test coverage, you don't need to test every single line of code ever written to have 100% test coverage in my eyes. But then when you go to translate your project to a new language, you port the tests first, then test against those tests.

This is my personal belief on this anyway.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#257

Post by bluejekyll »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #139
bluejekyll wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A discussion on licenses will go sideways very quickly. GPL does limit the adoption of software in certain environments. So it really depends on your goals. Do you want an OSS project that will be useable by everyone (including corporations) or do you want to guarantee that the software will always be OSS and guarantee that Corporations can’t benefit from it without contributing back (potentially requiring them to op…

> MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open. Sure it does. The original software will always remain open. It isn't like people can somehow take that away.

GPL is copy left, it has a stated goal of encouraging more software to be OSS, including new contributions. That’s what I meant by software remains open. MIT on the other hand can be used in closed source situations. While the original code will remain open, future changes are not required to be open source.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#258

Post by bayindirh »

eklavya wrote: post #245
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

So we will have a closed OS just like macOS and Windows but linux based. I don't see why it would stop all the other open source distros to exist.

Systemd is just another init system. People said the same thing about how it can exist with other ones in a level playing field.

By the virtue of having some motivated backers, not only they have pushed everyone out from any distro which matters or acts as a root for others, they have formed a neat little company called Amutable which produces tech allowing anyone to lockdown any installation to an immutable, untouchable state.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#259

Post by bayindirh »

IshKebab wrote: post #250
duskdozer wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, why not license it as GPL then? If they don't care of course.

Good question. Probably just because most Rust projects don't use GPL and they copied that. I searched but couldn't find an answer. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they change it to GPL just to shut people up.

> I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they change it to GPL just to shut people up.

They don't and wont.

> I searched but couldn't find an answer.

Here's the answer: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2757. This is a link I found long time ago and saved to reference when need arises.

From the (current) lead author:

    The license has been decided way before my time. I am 0 interest in starting a license debate (I care if the license is DFSG - Debian Free Software Guidelines) and spend time on it. I would rather use my limited time to make rust/coreutils ready for production.
More debate: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/834

From what I understood, they don't "believe" in GPL and don't like the idea of "having to keep it open". They believe in Developer Freedom(TM), not User Freedom(TM), so they don't care whether their code is closed by others or not.

To summarize #834: We don't like GPL. We'll do MIT, thanks.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#260

Post by dogleash »

duskdozer wrote: post #246
tmtvl wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eroding user's rights is good if it means users have fewer choices because choice is bad? I suppose it would mean that resources could concentrate in a smaller, more focused set of software, but I really can't see how that would justify the harm caused.

Just think about how easy it would be though - imagine - one single OS, one single version always immediately up to date, one consistent set of installed software, attestation to ensure no adversaries are attempting to modify or install unsupported software, full accurate and thorough analytics, what a dream...

> Just think about how easy it would be though

Endlessly painful. Right?

The defining characteristic is that everyone is using it, not that it's your personal ideal operating system. We have a few major players trying to create their version of the one single os. They're already nobodies ideal, and they have the luxury of telling people to go elsewhere if the system isn't right for them. Imagine how much worse it would be if they had to support everything.

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