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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And nothing you've linked or pointed out changes the claim I made: that re: rust, Canonical employees are making the decisions, not Debian.

Well, it's not always true. Look at how the proposal for making netplan the default network manager in Debian went. Not good, from Canonical's perspective. Making /tmp behave the way systemd guys want also went not according to plan. The behavior is modified somewhat because of the discussion. Rust's influence doesn't come from Canonical per se, but from its promise to eradicate memory related bugs. The initial hype…

The fact that Canonical has always been happy to ship software that they know fully well shouldn't be shipped doesn't fill me with hope that it will even work decently without causing massive issues to everyone (remember when they started to use pulseaudio? In the end it was such a mess that the solution was to abandon it).

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#262
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People seem to forget Linux is only a kernel. I certainly don't and that's why I'm advocating the userspace shall stay GPL. The freedom has two pillars. Kernel and userspace. If you mow one of the two down, you lose everything.

Yet there are already distros like Chimera Linux and Alpine Linux. That train is long gone, as folks rather have business friendly FOSS projects.

Folks rather have folks friendly FOSS projects :)

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#263

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.

Because well funded projects start to hire developers all over the place to add dependencies and it's very difficult to do otherwise when you have an army of salaried people who do that 40h a week.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#264

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.

Lol, that won't happen. The whole point for doing this is getting rid of yet another copyleft component. Especially GPLv3 stuff, companies hate it.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#265
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.

In what way rust needs to evolve? It seems pretty evolved to me already but I’m no language expert

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#266
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth trying!

It absolutely is worth trying. I look forward to it being battle tested and proven. I just don't want to be the one doing the testing. rg, fzf, and several others that I can't think have proven to me that rust is the direction going forward.

Rg/grep is kind of like make/ninja imo.

It’s not so much about the language as it is about the hindsight/developer/project

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#267

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…

Sure, but util-linux and the BSDs won't suddenly cease to exist. If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it. Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...

> If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it.

They said this for systemd too but look LFS dropped non-systemd support

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#268

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift. Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

> Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: That's not important. What I want to see is the Rewrite-it-in-Rust movement move towards GPL. GPL is pro-user. MIT is pro-business. In their zeal to convert, they are happily replacing pro-user software with pro-business software. Their primary goal is to convert, not to safeguard. If they shifted their goal from spreading Rust to protecting users, I'd be a lot happier abo…

Yup. Work hand in hand with FSF. Use GPLv3. No. it is about fat binaries that are just blobs without any introspection and ownership.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#269

They are vibe-translating C++ into Rust to change the licence. Replacing solid code with vibe code basically, in the name of safety. sudo-rs for example which is specifically mentioned has a drastically worst safety record than the C sudo.

But rust!! and AI!! and safety!!! /s

This noise around rust is aggravating. I loved Rust. Learned and used it from the first book but this garbage propaganda and MIT license thing is annoying so much

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#270

I don't care that the non-gnu coreutils are using rust. I care that they aren't GPL licensed. This means Canonical can offer proprietary patches on top of these packages and sell them as part of their "enterprise" offerings and this gives me the ick.

agreed!
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