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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

Let's port already portable software to non-portable languages! Yay!

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Rust is pretty darn portable as it is though. It runs on the major platforms. Are you thinking its Assembly or something? Everywhere FireFox is compiled to Rust has to run on, which is a lot of platforms.

Maybe it wont run on your toaster but if you are making git commits through your toaster you got other issues.

> if you are making git commits through your toaster you got other issues.

This made me snort out some coffee on a Monday. Thank you!

I think your point is also a good one I don't see represented often, portability for portability's sake is kinda silly. It's use that's important.

I agree with the sentiment behind your comment. Rust is very portable, but isn't portable to all platforms. Obviously it works on the big ones like Windows, macOS, most variants of Linux, BSD etc. but it doesn't on Alpine Linux. IIRC there was an issue compiling it without glibc (which Alpine lacks).

Edit - apparently rustc can now be linked to musl instead of glibc in nightly. Cool!

Rust can be compiled without glibc, by statically linking to musl, but it looks like it's still experimental as the only distribution of it is on the nightly channel: https://static.rust-lang.org/dist/rust-nightly-x86_64-unknow...

Compiling most Rust programs with MUSL is fine, and available on stable. But the rust compiler itself with MUSL had some issues, and this were worked out very recently, and so it hasn’t totally ridden the trains to stable yet. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/59302

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86_64/r...

Is this not a successful build? At that point it seems like the OS is just not providing the necessary tooling, but Rust will run on the architecture.

Maybe he's a plan 9 user.

Eh, why not? Seems like a chicken-and-egg thing. If there's no Rust support for some platform, fewer people will want to write things in it because they won't be able to run them where they want. But the less Rust software there is, the less interest anyone would have in writing build tools for less popular platforms.

Break out of these patterns by writing useful software in it that people would like to have on less popular platforms, so more people feel motivated to build and maintain build tools for it.

Unless you're being sarcastic and I'm just missing it, I think you'r missing the point here.

The author says quite clearly that it's "for fun and education".

If you really needed to run Rust code on some platform LLVM doesn’t natively support, it does allow you to compile to C. Presumably you could then compile that using whatever C compiler works for your platform.

Although Rust is not as portable as C, going through these hoops would mean that —- modulo codegen bugs —- the generated C code should still be as memory-safe as the original Rust code.

> it does allow you to compile to C

no, there is not any fully featured or official way to do that at the moment.

What do you mean by non-portable? Can't run on 32mb RAM?

You can run Rust code on microcontrollers where 32mb of RAM is far beyond the amount available. You won't be able to compile on that platform, but you can certainly target it (but git might not fit).

BTW is there opensource implementation of C on Windows?

There are open source C compilers that work on Windows, yes.

If there's nothing to link the result with, that's not really a proper implementation.

Linkers exist too.

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