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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about feelings, I find it "not likely" unless, perhaps as a side-effect of rethinking the whole feature all together. Or do you have some actual indicators that the issues with how modules are likely to break your work directory are related to problems that rust avoids?

Yes I do. Rust's strong type system makes logic bugs less likely, because you can encode more invariants into the type system. This also makes it easier to refactor and add features without risk of breaking things. The borrow checker also encourages ownership structures that are less error-prone. Finally the more modern tooling makes it easier to write tests. If you're thinking "where is the peer reviewed study that…

OK, but I'm not convinced for this specific case. And it wouldn't take a peer reviewed study to convince me. Issues in the git submodules handling that you could link to C's lack of safety would suffice.

However what you're doing is to reply with the same platitudes and generalities that all rust aficionados seem to have ready on demand. Sure, rust is better at those things, but I don't see how that would make a rewrite of an existing feature better by default. I don't doubt that new features of git that would be written in rust will be safer and more ergonomic, but for existing code to be rewritten, which is what I understand to be your stance, I remain skeptical.

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

#352

Is this a bit of chickens coming home to roost as far as developer culture forgetting how to work with cross-compiling toolchains? When I started my career, it was common understanding that the developer may be manipulating sourcecode on a different system and/or platform than where it will be executed. Our source control, editing, compilation, and execution was understood to happen in different computational spaces,…

> Is this a bit of chickens coming home to roost as far as developer culture forgetting how to work with cross-compiling toolchains? I don't understand your comment. Completely ignorning Rust the modern state of cross-compilation is an unmitigated disaster. Linux is especially bad because glibc is badly architected pile of garbage stuck in the 80s. It should be trivially possible to target any minimum glibc version f…

You mostly understand my comment, but not my graybeard perspective.

The modern disaster is exactly that developer culture has forgotten how to do this for the most part.

But, you're focusing on Rust compiling when I don't think it is relevant. If those weird financial platform developers were aware of cross-compiling, they wouldn't think that a developer tool like Git has to be built to run on the target financial server platform. They would be capable of cross-compiling or otherwise staging their build into that platform while still using Git on a supported workstation platform to manage the sources.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?? I build Jujutsu and many other Rust programs from source on Windows. Rust has a much better Windows story than C and bash do, due to its heritage as a language built by Mozilla for Firefox.

> Rust has a much better Windows story than C This is an extremely strong statement. Which is so obviously factually incorrect that I tend to think you might have meant something else.

As a Windows user, I find random Rust projects work on Windows far more often than random C ones, even if the authors didn’t make a specific attempt to support Windows.

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust has a much better Windows story than C This is an extremely strong statement. Which is so obviously factually incorrect that I tend to think you might have meant something else.

As a Windows user, I find random Rust projects work on Windows far more often than random C ones, even if the authors didn’t make a specific attempt to support Windows.

"work" as in "build"? I would agree with that.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Windows user, I find random Rust projects work on Windows far more often than random C ones, even if the authors didn’t make a specific attempt to support Windows.

"work" as in "build"? I would agree with that.

And run.

My colleague Bryan Cantrill, famously a huge Unix guy, once said to me “if you had told me that projects I write would just work on Windows at the rate they do, I wouldn’t have believed you.” When I started at Oxide I had to submit like one or two patches to use Path instead of appending strings and that was it, for my (at the time) main work project.

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

#356
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally a test of how people will react, so yes, finding out if people will react negatively would be exactly the point of doing the test in the first place. Would you prefer that they don't publicize what their follow-up plans would be to try to make it harder to criticize the plans? If you're against the plan, I'm pretty sure that's the exact type of feedback they're looking for, so it would make more sense…

> It's literally a test of how people will react What's there to test? It was obvious that the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative, so that's definitely not something they would care about. What else?

Is the reaction overwhelmingly negative? I haven’t read all of the emails but they seemed basically neutral or positive to me. Could you link me to some extremely negative ones, I’m curious.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's literally a test of how people will react What's there to test? It was obvious that the reaction would be overwhelmingly negative, so that's definitely not something they would care about. What else?

Is the reaction overwhelmingly negative? I haven’t read all of the emails but they seemed basically neutral or positive to me. Could you link me to some extremely negative ones, I’m curious.

The only reactions I was seeing were overwhelmingly negative. Just random people on Twitter.

While I love rust, I can't imaging being both sane and positive about that change.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if you want Git to never change you're free to stick with the current version forever . I'm sure that will work well.

I obviously don’t think that is wise, but Git is literally designed with this in mind: https://git-scm.com/docs/repository-version/2.39.0 Just like SQLite has an explicit compatibility guarantee through 2050. You literally do not have to update if you do not want to.

This is the repo format version.

It's pretty different from the git version, which receives new releases all the time for things like security patches, improvements, and new features.

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

#359
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I use Rust (and have been using it for close to 9 years) because I've been part of multiple teams that have delivered reliable, performant systems software in it, within a budget that would clearly be impossible in any other language. Rust acts as a step change in getting things done.

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

#360
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…

The whole point of Rust is that C, and all the code written therein (or as much as is feasible), be eventually replaced and abandoned. The potential costs of continuing to use C, and all the memory and concurrency bugs that come with it, runs in the billions worldwide if not more.

Besides which, in 2025 all the real ones are using jj, which is 100% Rust, not git—so if git wishes to remain competitive it needs to catch up.

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