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

lore.kernel.org

311–320 of 433 posts

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

#311
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are. This is firm "I don't want to have to learn new things" territory, which isn't a viable attitude in this industry. It's viable, but limiting. Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to, which is why it's called work. But if you can choose what platforms you work on, you can orient towards things where things change less, and then you don't need to learn new things as often. Chances are, if you get i…

No one’s laying off COBOL programmers. Specialization has its upsides once the market isn’t saturated!

As someone with experience in this specific niche, yes they absolutely are. There are no longer ten thousand retail chains asking for COBOL-based counterpoint PoS mods on a yearly basis.

The COBOL market is basically tenured experts in existing systems or polyglots helping migrate the systems to VB or C# at this point. The market has plummeted and now it's in the final deflationary shrink before death.

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

#312
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust isn't popular just because of memory safety though. I think the memory safety message is maybe a little too loud. It's also a modern language with fantastic tooling, very high quality library ecosystem and a strong type system that reduces the chance of all kinds of bugs. It's obviously not perfect: compile time is ... ok, there aren't any mature GUI toolkits (though that's true of many languages), async Rust ha…

Rust is a nice language, but it pushed too aggressively with the argument of "memory safety" at all cost ignoring other considerations. And Cargo is certainly a disaster even though it may be considered "fantastic tooling" by some. In any case, I do not think it is funny that I now depend on packages without timely security update in my distribution. This makes me less secure.

Is there better tooling in C/C++? No snark intended?

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a stronger argument if people were facing implementation deficiencies in git

I'm not sure exactly what you mean but of course people are facing implementation deficiencies in Git. Last I checked submodules were still "experimental" and extremely buggy, and don't work at all with worktrees. (And yeah submodules suck but sometimes I don't have a choice.)

Your reply seems to imply that using rust would make submodules better. Since that's not the case, maybe you can provide an alternative where rust would address an actual issue git users have.

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

#315
post #216
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…

git feels complete until you use a tool like jj or git-branchless (latter of which has things like in-memory merges in rust)

can you elaborate please? Why jj is more feature complete for you than git? I tried jj and for now it looks like too raw. The problem is also its git backed. I really don't want to care about two states of repo at the same time - one is my local jj, and another is remote git repo.

I think jj just has other conceptions compared to git. E.g. in git you probably will not change history too much (if pushed to remote especially), while in jj simple editing of commits is a front feature. So, comparing them in feature completeness looks strange to me

After some experience with jj I understand that jj is a user-oriented, user friendly tool with batteries included, while git is double-edged knife which is also highly customizable

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

#316
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing well-tested code is unsafe.

not changing working code to prevent issues is unsafe. we can go in circles all day with blanket statements that are all true. but we have ample evidence that even if we think some real-world C code is safe, it is often not because humans are extremely bad at writing safe C. sometimes it's worth preventing that more strongly, sometimes it's not, evidently they think that software that a truly gigantic amount of human…

believing that rewriting to rust will make code safe is unsafe) Of course it will be safer, but not safe. Safety is a marketing feature of rust and no more. But a lot of people really believe in it and will be zealously trying to prove that rust is safe.

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

#317
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. C is very simple.

We are talking about two axis here: - Complex by design - Complex to use C is complex to use because it is simple by design. Though I would argue the absurd amount of undefined behavior makes it not even simple by design.

> Though I would argue the absurd amount of undefined behavior makes it not even simple by design.

What? UB is the simplest thing you can do when you just don't want to specify behavior. Any specified behavior can't be simpler that unspecified because it's just comparing nothing with something

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

#318
post #274
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…

> I am curious, what is the reason behind introducing Rust in Git? More developers. Old C projects simply don't have enough incoming developers anymore. No one is clamoring to join the Git project and write C code. The Rewrite It In Rust(tm) brigade, on the other hand, will be happy, for now, to join and spread the gospel of Rust.

I'm not even a Rust or C developer and know this take is BS, Rust pretty clearly has major maintainability and code reliability/safety/stability benefits over C.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They enjoy being portable and like things to stay that way so when they introduce a new toolchain dependency which will make it harder for some people to compile git, they point it out in their change log?

I don't think "NonStop" is a good gauge of portability. But, I wasn't arguing against noting changes in a changelog, I'm arguing against putting portability to abstruse platforms before quality.

I don’t think staying portable means you have to do concession on quality. That merely limit your ability to introduce less portable dependancies.

But even then Git doesn’t mind losing some plateformes when they want to move forward on something.

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

#320
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…

To capture existing status for Rust promoters.
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