71–80 of 155 posts
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If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern development projects have a limited tolerance for anachronism before they say "get a modern toolchain up and running or get left behind, we're sick and tired of C89".
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To strongman the "anti" case: I believe that FreeBSD still nominally supports a number of architectures that have immature or no Rust support, which seems like a major blocker to (at least) rewriting major system components like devd in Rust. And build times are already a problem -- the joke five years ago was that the FreeBSD build was a wart on the side of Clang. Doubling that isn't ideal. That said, I'm a big Rust…
If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern development projects have a limited tolerance for anachronism before they say "get a modern toolchain up and running or get left behind, we're sick and tired of C89".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern development projects have a limited tolerance for anachronism before they say "get a modern toolchain up and running or get left behind, we're sick and tired of C89".
If by "modern" you mean "LLVM" then I'm sure the chip vendors will get right on it when they have a GCC backend that works and all of their customers use it.
Very naive question. What's the main selling point of Rust besides being stably sponsored by Mozilla?
One of the biggest things about Rust for me is that it's essentially Prometheus, bringing the fire of modern languages and more advances PL theory to systems programming, which imo is sorely needed. We don't need a 10% better C or C++, we need a huge jump for the field. Rust I think does this. They have: 1. A type system that's deeply inspired by OCaml, a language that's designed and used by a lot of programming lang…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "modern" you mean "LLVM" then I'm sure the chip vendors will get right on it when they have a GCC backend that works and all of their customers use it.
There is a Rust front-end for GCC that is under active development [1]. If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end then they can start contributing to it as an alternative. [1] https://rust-gcc.github.io/
oh, my sweet summer child...
To strongman the "anti" case: I believe that FreeBSD still nominally supports a number of architectures that have immature or no Rust support, which seems like a major blocker to (at least) rewriting major system components like devd in Rust. And build times are already a problem -- the joke five years ago was that the FreeBSD build was a wart on the side of Clang. Doubling that isn't ideal. That said, I'm a big Rust…
Of course, this only means we could, it doesn't necessarily mean we should.
To strongman the "anti" case: I believe that FreeBSD still nominally supports a number of architectures that have immature or no Rust support, which seems like a major blocker to (at least) rewriting major system components like devd in Rust. And build times are already a problem -- the joke five years ago was that the FreeBSD build was a wart on the side of Clang. Doubling that isn't ideal. That said, I'm a big Rust…
E.G. Curiosity rover is doing just fine running on millions of lines of C.
https://vdocuments.mx/monitoring-the-execution-of-space-craf...
If it's going to impact OS stability and decrease performance and portability of the humble, dependable, simple C, it doesn't belong in the core. C is better than Rust for OS development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern development projects have a limited tolerance for anachronism before they say "get a modern toolchain up and running or get left behind, we're sick and tired of C89".
I feel like that might leave embedded devices without an upgrade path, and those are the devices that needs to longest "warning". So yes, borrowed time, but that might be a decade. That no to say that Rust shouldn't be considered, but maybe initially for new development or selective rewrites. Some of the mentioned, like nscd or devd in particular, shouldn't be that high on the list. The ZFSd should be fairly safe, as…
This is also why we LTS versions.
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You go to parties where people are passionate about 32-bit PowerPC? ... can you invite me? This sounds great.
They might be Amigans which seems like a pretty bad outcome. Look forward to an hour or more of someone who is enthusiastically wrong about a broad range of topics and has been scammed for thousands of dollars without learning a thing from the experience. Oh the new one is faster and cheaper , but you had to get in early to lock in the price? And the delays have really only been a couple of years? Right, yes...
To strongman the "anti" case: I believe that FreeBSD still nominally supports a number of architectures that have immature or no Rust support, which seems like a major blocker to (at least) rewriting major system components like devd in Rust. And build times are already a problem -- the joke five years ago was that the FreeBSD build was a wart on the side of Clang. Doubling that isn't ideal. That said, I'm a big Rust…
Honestly, after being in the software industry for a couple of decades and seeing how many times folks attempt to reinvent the wheel (for commercial or other reasons), I am beginning to sigh when I see how many language zealots there are (not you, just in general). The reality is, Rust does not need to replace everything. Nor should it be held on some kind of pedestal. E.G. Curiosity rover is doing just fine running…