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

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

#321
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.

Every part of rust is undefined because there is no spec. It’s whatever their compiler does.

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

#322
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're correct about me. :-) I think it is really as simple as this: change is hard and a lot of people struggle with it to varying degrees for different reasons. Just look around at the people in your life and how they react to changes. It's really the same sort of pattern that plays out with Rust.

I distinctly remember reading the comments in the thread here about the initial release of ripgrep, and I remember coming away with a strong impression not just of your technical skill (which was apparent even before reading the thread), but just how pragmatic your viewpoint was. I didn't get the feeling you had any desire to displace anything, but just to solve a specific problem for people who wanted it, and if som…

Thanks for the kind words! And I'm not perfect either. I find the resistance to change to be extremely frustrating at points. And especially so when it involves misinformation of some sort.

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

#323
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of funny to see f-ing HPE with 60k employees somehow being labeled as the poor underdog that should be supported by the open-source community for free and can't be expected to take care of software running on their premium hardware for banks etc by themselves.

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?

Oh they absolutely can, they just choose not to. To just make some tools work again there's also many slightly odd workarounds one could choose over porting the Rust compiler.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every part of rust is undefined because there is no spec. It’s whatever their compiler does.

Ferrocene has donated their specification to the project, so there absolutely is a specification now. What you can argue is that the memory model isn‘t fully defined, but it‘s almost certainly going to land somewhere around stacked borrows or tree borrows. Arguably C doesn‘t fare much better in that regard though as it doesn‘t even properly define its pointer provenance model either and Rust is much closer to defining its.

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

#325
post #312
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I guess this depends on what you consider good tooling. I am relatively happy with C tooling. But if you want to quickly assemble something from existing libraries, then language-level package managers like npm, cargo, pip are certainly super convenient. But then, I think this convenience comes at a high cost. We now have worms again, I thought those times were long over... IMHO package management belongs into a distribution with quality control and dependencies should be minimized and carefully selected.

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

#326
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not what I said, but memory safety is certainly not anything which is a high priority for my own security. I still think memory safety is important and I also think Rust is an interesting language, but... the hype is exaggerated and driven by certain industry interests.

I'm an industry interest, in the sense that I work in the software industry and I have an interest in Rust.

Fair enough. I just find it mind boggling how much money flows into completely new language ecosystems compared to improvements for C/C++ tooling which would clearly much more effective if you really cared about overall security of the free software world.

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

#327
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every part of rust is undefined because there is no spec. It’s whatever their compiler does.

Ferrocene has donated their specification to the project, so there absolutely is a specification now. What you can argue is that the memory model isn‘t fully defined, but it‘s almost certainly going to land somewhere around stacked borrows or tree borrows. Arguably C doesn‘t fare much better in that regard though as it doesn‘t even properly define its pointer provenance model either and Rust is much closer to definin…

Oh something has changed in the last 6 months? glad they are making progress on the spec.

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

#328
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite the best example, since Git usually has unrestricted file access and network access through HTTP/SSH, any kind of RCE would be disastrous if used for data exfiltration, for instance. If you want a better example, take distributed database software: behind DMZ, and the interesting code paths require auth.

Unintentional bugs that caused data destruction would also be disastrous for a tool like git

Which are more likely to be introduced by a full rewrite.

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

#329
post #119
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK git already uses multiple languages, github says its 50% C, 38% shell, 4% perl, then 4% TCL python 1% So "another language" here probably does not weigh as much, especially considering perl/TCL are the weirder one there. But for big projects like linux and git, this could actually be a consolidation step: you spent decades growing, hacking things on top of each other. You have mostly figured out what this proje…

Perl, TCL and Python are all written in C, as well as many shells, so despite their interdependency the total complexity can be satisfied with a C11 compiler.

Oh no, we need Rust all the way to the core. /s

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

#330
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…

Developers who work on git think it will help them do their jobs better. Do you need any more reasons beyond that? They don't need to justify it to users necessarily.
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