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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

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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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 that's mainly needed on the larger platforms.

If those devices really need updates then the vendor can fork BSD and do the updates they need. It's not like the existing code will stop working on them.

This is also why we LTS versions.

I feel like those are the kinds of devices that never get manufacturer updates anyway. And even if they did, the manufacturer likely is no longer supporting them.

Sure, it's nice to be able to tinker and hack to see if you can upgrade them yourselves, but is it worth maintaining architecture support for that kind of use case? Not asserting that is definitely not, but I think it's worth considering.

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/

> If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end

oh, my sweet summer child...

You've got the prioritization backwards

What if Rust compiled to C? Wouldn’t that be a good way to support long tail platforms with low effort?

Not necessarily. C isn't a great language to target, since it's full of fun undefined behavior quirks that you will trip over if you look at it slightly cross-eyed. And part of the problem with the long tail platforms is that they can have issues that you don't expect (e.g., function pointers and data pointers might have different representation!).

So the main set of platforms you're looking at are ones that are functional enough to have modern, stable C compilers, aren't too quirky that reasonably portable C code would "just" work, and yet ones that you don't already have support for in Rust. Outside of the embedded space, there's like... fewer than 5 architectures left, the most notable of which probably being Alpha.

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