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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

#361

Post by bitwize »

surajrmal wrote: post #330
sebtron wrote: 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.

There's also the fact that if you want to recruit systems programmers for a project like git, the 19-year-old catgirls who are likely to be interested in that sort of work all work in Rust. Ask one to hack a legacy C code base and she might nyao at you angrily >:3

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

#362

Post by steveklabnik »

egorfine wrote: post #357
steveklabnik wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, so the people whose opinions they care about is going to be git contributors, not random Twitter users (some of whom can literally make money from outrage farming). The folks who actually do the work.

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

#363

Post by Yoric »

monkeyelite wrote: post #321
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #309

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.

Note that, in compiler lingo, unspecified and undefined are two different things. C++ is specified to death, but full of undefined behavior (and also some unspecified behavior).

Rust is largely not specified, but aims to have no undefined behavior (outside of unsafe blocks).

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

#365

Post by hoppp »

bitwize wrote: post #361
surajrmal wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also the fact that if you want to recruit systems programmers for a project like git, the 19-year-old catgirls who are likely to be interested in that sort of work all work in Rust. Ask one to hack a legacy C code base and she might nyao at you angrily >:3

Why not zig tho.. keep the C, compile with zigcc and write new code in zig. Best of both worlds.

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

#366

Post by hoppp »

IshKebab wrote: post #57
bArray wrote: post #54

Maybe I'm just old and moany, and I need to step aside for bigger and better things such as Rust. But. Now rather than needing to understand just C to work on Git/kernel, you now need to also know Rust. The toolchain complexity is increasing, and the mix of these languages increases the barrier to entry. I'm highly invested into Git, having learned the tooling and having a significant number of projects constructed w…

> I'm just old and moany, and I need to step aside for bigger and better things such as Rust. 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. In any case Rust is usually easier than C (excluding buggy C which is very easy to write), and certainly easier than actually learning the Git or Linux codebases.

Technical debt is real tho and the rust-c interop is not the best ever.

Why not rewrite the entire git in rust and have two compatible versions?

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

#367

Post by hoppp »

IshKebab wrote: post #258
uecker wrote: 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.

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…

It can have supply chain attacks like npm... That high quality library system is also a liability.

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

#368

Post by RicoElectrico »

bitwize wrote: post #361
surajrmal wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also the fact that if you want to recruit systems programmers for a project like git, the 19-year-old catgirls who are likely to be interested in that sort of work all work in Rust. Ask one to hack a legacy C code base and she might nyao at you angrily >:3

Idk if it's funny or sad, cause it's true.

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

#369

Post by uecker »

cwyers wrote: post #342
uecker wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue with investing similar levels of effort into making C++ safer is the C++ standards committee doesn't want to adopt those kinds of improvements.

I am not interested in C++, it is also far too complex. In my opinion software needs to become simpler and not more complicated, and I fear Rust might be a step into the wrong direction.

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

#370

Post by monkeyelite »

Yoric wrote: post #363
monkeyelite wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Note that, in compiler lingo, unspecified and undefined are two different things. C++ is specified to death, but full of undefined behavior (and also some unspecified behavior). Rust is largely not specified, but aims to have no undefined behavior (outside of unsafe blocks).

I am aware but without a spec we don’t know which is which. You can’t say it has no undefined behavior because what happens is you try to specify it and find gaps or challenges.

In C undefined is used primarily when there is not a reliable and efficient mechanism for detecting a problem is happening. For example a C implementation may check every single invalid pointer deref, but more realistically it only detects only extreme out of range. So it’s undefined what happens.

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