What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust
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Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors.
Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective.
Consider: An end to end signature-enabled, verified, attestable, Linux environment with completely closed source util-linux and userland packages, down to the "ls" and "cd". Deliciously apocalyptic.
We're two stops away from this, and there are no shortage of momentum or funding to enable teh future.
Personally, I'd always choose to use a distribution with open source userland packages and utils, but if closed source alternatives exist and conform to the same specifications (i.e. we get "embrace" without the "extend and extinguish") then I don't mind if a company has closed sourced tech, especially if it'll help there business case, potentially boosting funding for open source linux projects.
Maybe that's all naive, I guess we'll find out if ubuntu really do go for more and more closed source options.
When you put Snaps, Juju, uutils, etc. as a list, it all smells like a path to lockdown, not dissimilar to what RedHat did with their "unbranded" patches recently (IBM being IBM, which was unsurprising).
Also, remembering how Canonical worked together with Microsoft on some projects like WSL, which felt like "Surrender servers to Linux, and save the Windows desktop by allowing Linux run as a slave inside a VM" type of deal, I do not trust them a bit.
So, Linux is maturing, but it'll also bring a couple of very big cracks through ecosystem, and it'll be noisy and painful. Personally, I'm on Debian for the last 20+ years, and not planning to move anywhere for now.
I understand that there needs to be an economy, but money is not more important than destroying what we're standing on. Let it be physical like our planet, or virtual like the free software and the culture we built around it.
This only ever happens when the party trying to EEE is fighting a losing battle. If they have the upper hand, they will always get to the extend and extinguish part. Do we think movements for user freedom have the upper hand right now?
People complain about AWS and others taking OSS projects and profiting wildly off them, but they're all children compared to the machinations of Ubuntu.
It's been this way from the start. The constant conflict of interest, where Ubuntu devs manipulate debian democratic processes, and the inclusion of systemd and its ridiculous swiss-army-knife implementation of an init system and surrounding tools.
You ever see those knives, the huge ones, with a screwdriver, plyers, and 100 other tools on them? Thing is, they're all crap. They work for an odd case, but you always need to reach for a real tool.
That's systemd. Whether systemd-timesync, its dns services, or anything else it does, it's kiddie time. Barely functional, broken in inane ways, and leaving any professional in a situation of endless masking of a myriad of barely cogent and horribly malign services.
We didn't gain anything with systemd, except for an init system 1000 times larger, codebase wise, and a collection of tools you have to replace anyhow.
And now these guys want to do Amutable. I hope they fail, for if they succeed, they will sink us further into this absurd system. Systemd for death. For despair. For dislike. For dumb. For disregard, devilment, debased, disturbed, systemd is all these things, and more, all packaged for you, all presented to you, all given to you, to all of us, dragging us down, destroying us.
If there is an apocalypse, it'll be somehow some bug in systemd that causes it. Nukes will fly due to its broken code, viral containment systems will fail due to buffer overruns in its code, systemd is the end-of-world waiting to happen, its over-complicated, poorly written code a guillotine waiting to fall upon us all.
I run thousands of sysvinit, and thousands of systemd systems.
Which ones, do you think, have the worse record of "something stupid" bringing down a service, a machine, preventing a boot up, you name it, it's systemd.
I swear to God that Trump exists because of systemd somehow. I place all the ills, perils, at the feet of systemd. It represents everything wrong in the tech ecosystem, its tendrils spreading dark, deep disturbing dreams of madness through all it touches.
Just learning how to use systemd, destroys the logic centres of the mind, rendering advocates incapable of productive work.
All wrong and ill that befalls this world, is at its feet.
I suspect through some incomprehensible twist of fate, the entire fabric of the universe may unravel, undoing all that is, and ever was. All lost, all gone, all because of systemd.
I am beginning to suspect I dislike systemd.
(Send $19.95 to my address, if you wish to subscribe to my newsletter, and hear my REAL, UNFILTERED opinions about systemd)
systemd won the init system wars because it is pretty damn good from a technical perspective. The competition didn't even try to participate.
>Barely functional, broken in inane ways, and leaving any professional in a situation of endless masking of a myriad of barely cogent and horribly malign services.
Everything you're complaining about was even more true of previous init systems and barely true for systemd at all.
Meanwhile Ubuntu is a garbage fire from a technical perspective. Snaps are garbage and forced down your throat.
Gnome would no longer work on Debian.
Understand, that many of the issues "resolved" by systemd, were redhat issues. And further, not even init issues.
For example, the most predominant being "predictable NIC names", which were already a thing with Debian. Or bootup times, of which Debian had excellent parallelization and boot times of a similar scope to how "fast" systemd was.
There's really nothing good, from a technical perspective, when something is enlarged 1000x the requirement. If you look at the code for sysvinit, it's maybe 10k lines. Systemd is > 1M lines of code, likely approaching 1.5M by now. So I suppose, 100x the size.
It needs to be understood that the more code you have, the more bugs. It's just the way it is. There have been more security issues in core systemd yearly, than sysvinit in its entire lifespan. That's not even systemd's fault, it's just a simple fact, you have more code, you have more bugs.
And when you say "systemd", you're likely referring to all the inane nonsense it does? How broken it is managing mounts, which really isn't an init's job anyhow? Or the absurd nature of having shutdown and startup identical, with automatic ordering, so you end up in all sorts of ridiculous edge cases?
Why would anyone presume that start and stop MUST be mirror images of each other. The very logic is broken, and shows an immense lack of comprehension of how the real world works.
And you speak of "it won" for superior this and that? At the start, it didn't even have an easy way to extend stop time. Hell, even now it just sends SIGTERM and a nanosecond later SIGKILL, as if shutting down a box FAST FAST NOW NOW is more important that data integrity or properly closed tcp connections or processes doing any form of proper cleanup.
The number of mysql/database issues caused by this behaviour in the early days was insane.
Look, I get you like systemd. But it's provided no real value, and certainly, even if there is some? The detractors outweigh it as the sun turns meat to leather.
The systemd repo is a mono repo for other tools in addition to the init system.
I've heard from many sysadmins and distribution maintainers that systemd has been amazing. We went from ad hoc shell scripts to declarative plain text files. I think that's a huge win.
Current sysadmin and former distro maintainer here, who respectfully disagrees with you and your friends.
Many, if not all software packages followed a well-defined SYS-V service file stub, esp. after so-called "Parallel SYS-V". We were able to order services, define dependencies and deterministically boot systems at the speed of light. Nothing broke, and the systems fully supported "pull the plug if you want, it won't break" promise.
While I don't hate systemd, I don't like its many ways. It's something like X11 before auto-configuring support for me. The less I touch it, less grumpy I am. Technical parts aside, remembering the ugliness surrounding it (people, ecosystem and predatory aspects) makes me really angry sometimes.
Tip: Research "Amutable" and what they are up to.
My immense, strong suspicion here, is that they believe they can use their control over the systemd project, to add immense layers of code and change, to support Amutable's needs.
When this happens, there will likely be pushback of some sort. I'm hoping a fork will happen at that time, and even better, hoping that maybe the project can go someplace saner.
Getting rid of all tcp support (eg, systemd providing inetd functionality) from an init system would be an excellent start. The absurdity of pid 1 having networking hooks is absolutely madness.
Splitting start/stop ordering would be an additional benefit.
Removing all daemons, and all support code, and forking them (for legacy support) would be next. No horribly enacted timesyncd, or resolvd.
Dropping the absurd journal and returning to a syslog solution would be next. Literal kiddie town, to have no centralized logging as a default when first created. There are now attempts to entirely re-skin the cat, with systemd-journal-gatewayd, yet every single appliance and piece of hardware supports... that's right, syslog protocol, not systemd's proprietary journalling protocol or formats.
There is so much about systemd that is just about re-writing the entire universe, not for immense gain, not for immense improvement, but instead for the tiniest, smallest shred of edge-case betterment, and meanwhile, creating massive, overwhelming denigration of every other aspect of that same use case.
Has the journal improved anything for anyone, anywhere, in any real, meaningful way? Absolutely not. All searching, etc is available on text files with | grep. Zero improvement.
Has the journal improved performance? No.
And the ridiculous and absurd and inane concept of the journal being removed at each reboot?
It's as if the people writing systemd, had absolutely no real-world experience with servers, maintaining them, or working with them, and simply made design decisions predicated upon rumour, with no actual understanding of edge cases, or why things are, or were, as they are.
--
An example would be some aspects of Hyundais. They are relatively new, in many ways, to much of the market they have entered. Yes, I know, decades may not seem like that, but it is so. And until they stole all of Toyota's QA methods by hiring engineers (which also took all documentation), they were of horrible quality.
That said, I say in one of their newer SUVs, electric, the other day. Their dashboard, down at the bottom, ended in a sharp corner. When I sat in the car, I realised that should I be in an accident, or even brake aggressively, my kneecap would mash into this non-rounded, extremely square, sharp angle. I could literally see my kneecap being sliced/popped off.
This sort of "it's silly to have round everywhere, let's do something new ascetically, and make it a sharp edge down there!", coupled with "There aren't many people 6'3" in S. Korea, so we'll never notice how dangerous this is", is a prime example of this.
The authors had no idea of edge cases, and the litany of bug reports over the last decade has shown all their supposed improvements filed away, as they have basically had to conform to logical design standards, developed by people far wiser than they, over the last half century.
No, someone-new-to-the-entire-unix-ecosystem, the phrase "but we can just" isn't a viable means to determine sensible design methodology.
Go ahead, enact change, just make sure it makes some sense.
yes, systemd changed how I manage my systems, but it didn't bring in speed, safety or integration I didn't have before them. Moreover, they brought out secure-boot related shenanigans in house and integrated to everything it touches. Before that the line was drawn at the bootloader.
Desktop environment doesn't matter much, because GTK and Qt works on every Linux Desktop. I'm using KDE, but I don't know which tools I use are GTK, which are Qt, etc. Qt and GTK teams collaborate a ton both in window management and desktop underpinnings side. Also there are tons of standards, and things just work if you follow them. Even the standard libraries of programming languages and Linux userland gives the tools to utilize these standards.
C libraries are mostly interoperable. I operate with GNU's C library, but aside from interesting behavioral differences, the API is not different.
If you're not writing daemons, you have no business with your init system in 99% of the cases, unless you want to utilize a special feature of any of them. You can just ship the service files. daemon() function is part of libc, not your init system.
In total, after your code builds, you can add these layers step by step, one at a time, and have a codebase which works everywhere with minimal effort.
Endlessly painful. Right?
The defining characteristic is that everyone is using it, not that it's your personal ideal operating system. We have a few major players trying to create their version of the one single os. They're already nobodies ideal, and they have the luxury of telling people to go elsewhere if the system isn't right for them. Imagine how much worse it would be if they had to support everything.
If you centralise then it is not the question "Will?" but "When?" it will fail.
They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain.
All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)
Ubuntu forks Sid, and evolves from there. They don't downstream Debian Stable.
> All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)
Daily driving Debian stable on servers and Testing on desktops for more than two decades. Testing is a rolling distribution and you install it once (ever). The only time I reinstalled it was to migrate to 64 bit architecture back in the day.
Also, considering stable to stable upgrades take 5 minutes, I have no problems with Debian Stable, either.
Fedora is nice, but it's RedHat's lab. While I have nothing against them, it's not user oriented as much as it looks. Debian Testing is much more stable than many (if not almost all) of the alternative distros, and follows versions reasonably well.
IF I want cutting edge, I can go Arch or Gentoo way. Lastly, Debian is an iceberg. Looks simple from outside, and once you start to develop it, you understand why Debian is considered one of the golden standards. The underbelly is a rich ecosystem of very well designed yet simple subsystems.
That take in of itself also feels... uncommon?
My experience matches yours more or less, I've run both Debian (and their LTS project version at one point) and Ubuntu LTS on my servers, both have been generally okay, albeit with a snag or two along the way.
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-and-grub-are-broken
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-updates-are-broken
https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ubuntu-lts-is-broken
Aside from a few cases of not-very-serious configurations with off the shelf hardware having issues that I get to write the occasional rant about (back when I had an "Everything is broken" section in my blog), it's been surprisingly stable otherwise.
I've had far more issues with RHEL-compatible distros (hate that they killed CentOS, Oracle Linux is sometimes weird but kinda works, outside of work stuff I'd personally reach for Rocky Linux which is a nicer experience) both when it comes to running stuff like Docker (way before Podman was even stable, RHEL-compatibles didn't play nicely with Docker when it came to SELinux and networking) and also support for slightly more uncommon consumer hardware, like my netbook touchpad didn't work at all by default on Fedora, but did work on DEB distros.
The 10 year EOL is really nice, though, and if they had something as nice as Proxmox (for free), I'd probably be using RPM distros for my hypervisors right now!
That's also kind of why I think saying that either of those don't have much of a future would be an odd statement - in my experience, both have their occasional issues but are still generally good for desktop and server use cases.
As an addendum, however, snaps suck, viva la Linux Mint for desktop, plus, Cinnamon is a nice desktop and it's still close enough to Ubuntu LTS I run on servers if I ever need that familiarity in regards to packages!
So we're kind of left out of options, because there is hardly another distro on Distrowatch that has a similar success rate being installed on random laptops that normies want to try GNU/Linux on.
There is also a reason why all the GNU/Linux competition on embedded space, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr, aren't GPL licensed.
People seem to forget Linux is only a kernel.
I certainly don't and that's why I'm advocating the userspace shall stay GPL. The freedom has two pillars. Kernel and userspace. If you mow one of the two down, you lose everything.
That train is long gone, as folks rather have business friendly FOSS projects.
World's history has changed through wars where some people said that winning [said war] is impossible.
Nothing is set in stone. World is changing more drastically than ever. Assuming that we can't change things or things will stay a certain way is a funny fallacy, at best.
Permanence is an illusion. The pendulum is on the move. It might be moving in a way I don't like, but it can't continue like that forever. I'm just doing what I feel right. I'd rather die trying than regretting that I didn't try.
Like MinIO, Solaris, Elasticsearch, Hashicorp Suite and countless others. The versions before the license changes are healthy as a doornail. You're absolutely right.
Some of them are re-forked, some did not.
Also, sometimes that closed fork is the only viable option, making the hardware it's running on an expensive doornail. I also don't like that.
I remember using SDKs and software forked from open ones with version numbers like "1.8.7-really1.9.0-internal-thishardwareonly-special-3.2.5-unlocked" which only runs on a distro from 2006 when it's full moon on 29th of February, and the sum of digits of the date is divisible by 7 and 11 at the same time.
Can you patch this? I guess you can, but where's the source? I bet somebody deleted it by accident and it's not present anymore.
Permissive licenses don't take away the four freedoms, but add a fifth one. The ability to take the other four away. Without prior notice. This is what I don't like personally.
In short, I don't like doornails which are not actual doornails. Permissive licenses enable that freedom.
Can we stop this conspiracy nonsense? They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway! No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL. That's ridiculous for so many reasons, not least you can just use the BSD versions, as Apple does (and they still release the source code!).
If they can earn my trust, why not? I'm not a pointlessly stubborn person. I have changed my views in the past, and can certainly change in the future. This my view resulting from my experiences, and jury is still out from my perspective. If you want to trust Canonical and Co., you can. Don't let me stop you.
> They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway!
Who prevents forking Ubuntu and taking that extra mile, esp. now we have a company which wants to enable exactly that lockdown?
> No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL.
Belts have holes. They can be used to hold or to choke. Adding more holes to a belt allows more different uses.
> That's ridiculous for so many reasons,
Can you give me more reasons to believe me that I'm a tinfoil wearing crazy weirdo?
> not least you can just use the BSD versions, as Apple does (and they still release the source code!).
Same Apple removing any GPLv3 (and possibly GPLv2) tool from their roster in every iteration from their OS. Same Apple which provides no way to verify that what's published is what's running on their hardware. Same Apple which provides SIP to seal their system partitions which can't be modified without breaking tons of guarantees and seals. Same Apple which controls from their processor to software, without any gaps.
Having the source have no meaning there. You can't use that source. You can't modify the machine you use, you can't install any other OS or just test something.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they change it to GPL just to shut people up.
They don't and wont.
> I searched but couldn't find an answer.
Here's the answer: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2757. This is a link I found long time ago and saved to reference when need arises.
From the (current) lead author:
The license has been decided way before my time. I am 0 interest in starting a license debate (I care if the license is DFSG - Debian Free Software Guidelines) and spend time on it. I would rather use my limited time to make rust/coreutils ready for production.
From what I understood, they don't "believe" in GPL and don't like the idea of "having to keep it open". They believe in Developer Freedom(TM), not User Freedom(TM), so they don't care whether their code is closed by others or not.
To summarize #834: We don't like GPL. We'll do MIT, thanks.
Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...
And then websites and applications stop working if you're not using a verified, attested, locked-down OS and you're stuck with your nice free software system that will not do your online banking, let you chat with your friends, or access your company resources.
Edit: Also, why would some userspace components in a slightly-less-free license cause this to happen? if the powers-that-be want to shut you out of the internet, they can do it now; lots of proprietary software already exists.
It won't, in itself, but it appears to be yet another little push forward on the slippery slope that probably will end where it appears to inevitably end.
But in places where that stuff isn't relevant, we already see a lot of locked-down devices like the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation based on BSD precisely because they can leverage free software but still lock it down. macOS with its BSD userland is also kind of like this -- the OS is getting gradually more locked down over time, but the frog boils slowly.
If you tighten the screws too hard and fast then people will scream and yell and maybe leave your business for a competitor -- even though it's technically feasible, that means you can't disallow access to banking websites for generic-browser-on-generic-OS now. But we are, brick by brick, building a foundation where that will seem inevitable.
The argument is basically that making it easier to lock down general purpose computing devices like desktop computers (by, for example, making a non-GPL drop-in replacement for GNU *utils) will eventually aid in making it happen. The powers that be will use tried-and-true arguments about security and think-of-the-kids etc to make it seem like running a mutable, untrusted OS is an unacceptable risk.
Some linux users aren't going to stop this sort of thing from happening. If Chase Bank wants to only allow MacOS and Windows 11 computers to access their website, the 1% of their userbase that uses something else isn't going to move the needle, and 99% of their users won't care (or even notice).
If this was going to happen, it would have already happened. The pieces are all there already.
Same things were said for:
- Removal of DRM from music: Happened.
- Age verification in the internet: Happening.
- Locked down personal devices: Happened.
- Total surveillance in cities: Happened.
- Not being able to buy but only rent: Happened in many digital formats.
- Internet activation of software: Happened.
- Tracking individual persons real-time: Happened.
- Browser attestation: Google is trying hard.
- Attestation for Internet Banking: Reality in S. Korea.
This is absolutely true. I'm saying someone should care, because it does matter.
Some linux users aren't going to stop this sort of thing from happening. If Chase Bank wants to only allow MacOS and Windows 11 computers to access their website, the 1% of their userbase that uses something else isn't going to move the needle, and 99% of their users won't care (or even notice).
For some businesses, losing 1% of your customers is actually a lot of customers and a lot of money, and all else being equal they would prefer to not lose them.
If this was going to happen, it would have already happened. The pieces are all there already.
No, they really aren't. Again, it's perhaps technically feasible to flip the switch, but it doesn't make business sense yet.
How many people are doing online banking without running on a fully cryptographically verifiable/attestable OS? This means everyone not using a TPM, Secure Boot, etc. This means grandpa with an old Windows 10 machine or an old Mac that perhaps he should not still be using but he doesn't care, he just wants to pay his bills. I don't have numbers of course but I bet you this starts looking like a hell of a lot more than 1% of the userbase.
There are web APIs for this sort of thing in all major browsers but no one is really using them yet. But they exist for a reason, much like Windows 11 requires a TPM for a reason, and this tech will at some point be deployed for things like online banking. Of course it will.
If you have too much non-standard stuff going on in your browser or mobile device, this is already happening, to a degree. Not a hard block, but increasing difficulties
Its like those movies coming true. I've already had casual user accounts frozen just for accessing via VPN, or some other inscrutable reason.
So fine, exclude me from all your platforms, there's nothing there for me. It's all bad content from bad people (or increasingly: not even people) running on bad software. I'm not giving up my freedom to partake in that, I'd rather just stop using your shit.
(But I would very much like to be able to pay my bills and buy my train tickets, so I'll play your game and have a smartphone. Fine. You win this round.).
> Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...
Well, I use Debian before Ubuntu has existed, and it was never unstable to begin with. I understand the value of more eyes looking into something and its advantages, but let's say, Ubuntu has acted with selfish reasons towards Debian in some cases. I personally taken side in one of these debates, even.
Yes, I follow debian-devel, and even leaded a Debian derivative distro for some time.
>I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. ... If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port. It's important for the project as whole to be able to move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices.
If you think Canonical isn't going to lead Debian around by the nose on this you haven't been paying attention.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/10/msg00288.html
``` Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv). ```
It seems to me that the APT change was just a nail in the coffin of these older architectures, which would have eventually been sunset anyway, due to sqv not being available. If you really want to run some kind of Linux on these very old machines, godspeed, but you can't expect them to be maintained by a project with it's fingers in so many pies forever.
Look at how the proposal for making netplan the default network manager in Debian went. Not good, from Canonical's perspective.
Making /tmp behave the way systemd guys want also went not according to plan. The behavior is modified somewhat because of the discussion.
Rust's influence doesn't come from Canonical per se, but from its promise to eradicate memory related bugs. The initial hype was off the charts, but it's coming down, and the shortcomings are becoming obvious.
Canonical is trying to affect Debian, that's true, but it's not always a given.
Pipewire is working great.
So when it isn't going into the right direction that we care, maybe more people with other mindset should join.
It is like complaining about who wins elections without bothering to cast a valid vote.
They said this for systemd too but look LFS dropped non-systemd support
By the virtue of having some motivated backers, not only they have pushed everyone out from any distro which matters or acts as a root for others, they have formed a neat little company called Amutable which produces tech allowing anyone to lockdown any installation to an immutable, untouchable state.
Thanks for your input. Can you please elaborate about these problems a bit more? I'm pretty new on this Linux thing. Using for just 20 years or so, and managing a quite a few hundred servers only. systemd didn't make my life drastically different or smoother.
Oh, I also used to be a tech-lead of a Debian derivative, and also did some country-wide rollouts of the thing we developed, but I'm sure it has no addition to my already extremely limited knowledge of how things work.
Maybe this is because I'm a noob, or not using enough machines, or not have enough downtime, IDK.
Any info will be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift.
Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.
It's also as bad as C.
I'm saying that the chasm to cross is a safe ABI.
1) It can't be that replacing 20 C/C++ shared objects with 20 Rust shared objects results in 20 copies of the Rust standard library and other dependencies that those Rust libraries pull in. But, today, that is what happens. For some situations, this is too much of a memory usage regression to be tolerable.
2) If you really have 20 libraries calling into one another using C ABI, then you end up with manual memory management and manual buffer offset management everywhere even if you rewrite the innards in Rust. So long as Rust doesn't have a safe ABI, the upside of a Rust rewrite might be too low in terms of safety/security gained to be worth doing
Also unsafe rust has always on strict-aliasing, which makes writing code difficult unless you do it in certain ways.
Having glue libraries like pyo3 makes it good in rust. But that introduces bloat and other issues. This has been the biggest issue I had with rust, it is too hard to write something so you use a dependency. And before you know it, you are bloating out of control
Wait, Rust can already communicate using the C ABI. In fact, it offers exactly the same capabilities as C++ in this regard (dynamic linking).
I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there.
There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.
> There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.
Of course C and C++ are no safer in this regard. (Well, with Fil-C they are safer, but like whatever.)
But that misses the point, which is that:
- It would be a big deal if Rust did have a safe dynamic linking ABI. Someone should do it. That's the main point I'm making. I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting.
- So long as this problem isn't fixed, the upside of using Rust to replace a lot of the load bearing stuff in an OS is much lower than it should be to justify the effort. This point is debatable for sure, but your arguments don't address it.
I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.
Fil-C solves it. I think Swift solves it, too.
So it's solvable.
No fundamental reason, that I know of, why Rust or any other safe language can't also have some kind of story here.
> I think you're moving the goalposts significantly here.
No. I'm describing a problem worth solving.
Also, I think a major chasm for Rust to cross is how defensive the community gets. It's important to talk about problems so that the problems can be solved. That's how stuff gets better.
Rust-to-rust code should be able to be dynamically linked with an ABI that has better safety guarantees than the C ABI. That’s the point. You can’t even express an Option<T> via the C ABI, let alone the myriad of other things rust has that are put together to make it a safe language.
You can look to Swift for prior art on how this can be done: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/
It would be very hard to accomplish. Apple was extremely motivated to make Swift have a resilient/stable ABI, because they wanted to author system frameworks in swift and have third parties use them in swift code (including globally updating said frameworks without any apps needing to recompile.) They wanted these frameworks to feel like idiomatic swift code too, not just be a bunch of pointers and manual allocation. There’s a good argument that (1) Rust doesn’t consider this an important enough feature and (2) they don’t have enough resources to accomplish it even if they did. But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.
Thank you :-)
> It would be very hard to accomplish.
Yeah it's a super hard problem especially when you provide safety using the type system!
The work the Swift team did here is hella impressive.
> But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.
Yeah!
> It would be very hard to accomplish.
Since Rust cares very much about zero-overhead abstractions and performance, I would guess if something like this were to be implemented, it would have to be via some optional (crate/module/function?) attributes, and the default would remain the existing monomorphization style of code generation.
But you can express Option<Foo> for a concrete Foo. Do you really need any more than that?
I don’t think that’s true?
https://users.rust-lang.org/t/option-is-ffi-safe-or-not/2982...
You could maybe say that a pointer can be transmuted to an Option<&T> because there’s an Option-specific optimization that an Option<&T> uses null as the None value, but that’s not always guaranteed. And it doesn’t apply to non-references, for instance Option<bool>’s None value would be indistinguishable from false. You could get lucky if you launder your Option<T> through repr(C) and the compiler versions match and don’t mangle the internal representation, but there’s no guarantees here, since the ABI isn’t stable. (You even get a warning if you try to put a struct in your function signatures that doesn’t have a stable repr(C).)
Right, that's the whole point of this thread. The only stable ABI rust has is one where you can only use C's features at the boundaries. It would be really nice if that wasn't the case (ie. if you could express "real" rust types at a stable ABI boundary.)
As OP said, "I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting". People seem intent on steering that conversation that way anyway, I guess.
E.g. the kernel wouldn't really benefit from a "safe ABI" because users calling into the kernel need to be considered malicious by default.
I think we all agree that it would be a huge deal.
> - So long as this problem isn't fixed, the upside of using Rust to replace a lot of the load bearing stuff in an OS is much lower than it should be to justify the effort. This point is debatable for sure, but your arguments don't address it.
As you point out, this is the debatable part, and I'm not sure I get your justification here.
> It can't be that replacing 20 C/C++ shared objects with 20 Rust shared objects results in 20 copies of the Rust standard library and other dependencies that those Rust libraries pull in. But, today, that is what happens. For some situations, this is too much of a memory usage regression to be tolerable.
If memory was cheap, then maybe you could say, "who cares".
Unfortunately memory isn't cheap these days
One of the very first consumer hardware to support dynamic linking was the Amiga, with its Libraries and DataTypes.
We moved away from having a full blown OS done with static linking, with exception of embedded deployments and firmware, for many reasons.
"compression is insanely effective" - And what about energy? compression will increase CPU use. It will also make everything slower - slower than just plain deduplication. Also, your reason for using worse for user tech is: the user can mitigate in other ways? This strikes me as the same logic as "we don't need to optimize our program/game, users will just buy better hardware" or just plain throwing cost to user - this is not valid solution just downplaying of the argument.
This isn’t that kind of duplication.
In C, a function definition usually corresponds 1-to-1 to a function in object code. In Rust, plenty of things in the stdlib are generic functions that effectively get a separate implementation for each type you use them with.
If there's a library that defines Foo but doesn't use VecFoo>, and there are 3 other libraries in your program that do use that type, where should the Vec functions specialized for Foo reside? How do languages like Swift (which is notoriously dynamically-linked) solve this?
You can't have safe dynamic linking, dynamic linking requires you to trust the library you load with no ability to verify.
You are aware that Rust already fails that without dynamic linking? The wrapper around the C getenv functionality was originally considered safe, despite every bit of documentation on getenv calling out thread safety issues.
It's no different than a bug in an unsafe pure Rust function.
I'm choosing to ignore that libc is typically dynamically linked, but linking in foreign code and marking it safe is a choice to trust the code. Under dynamic linking anything could get linked in, unlike static linking. At least a static link only includes the code you (theoretically) audited and decided is safe.
You cannot change anything that would affect the class layout of something in the STL. For templated functions where the implementation is in the header, ODR means you can't add optimizations later on.
Maybe this was OK in the 90s when companies deleted the source code and laid off the programmers once the software was done, but it's not a feature Rust should ever support or guarantee.
The "stable ABI" is C functions and nothing else for a very good reason.
In lots of domains, having a language that doesn't change very much, or that only changes very carefully with backcompat being taken super seriously, is more important than the memory safety guarantees Rust offers.
As a C++ developer, I regularly deal with people that think creating a compiled object file and throwing away the source code is acceptable, or decide to hide source code for "security" while distributing object files. This makes my life hell.
Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.
I mean yeah that's bad.
> Rust preventing this makes my life so much better.
I'm talking about a different issue, which is: how do you create software that's in the billions of lines of code in scale. That's the scale of desktop OSes. Probably also the scale of some other things too.
At that scale, you can't just give everyone the source and tell them to do a world compile. Stable ABIs fix that. Also, you can't coordinate between all of the people involved other than via stable ABIs. So stable ABIs save both individual build time and reduce cognitive load.
This is true even and especially if everyone has access to everyone else's source code
Firstly, of course you could.
Secondly, you don't even need to, as NixOS shows.
Rust supports ABI compatibility if everyone is on the same compiler version.
That means you can have a distributed caching architecture for your billion line monorepo where everyone can compile world at all times because they share artifacts. Google pioneered this for C++ and doesn't need to care about ABI as a result.
What Rust does not support is a team deciding they don't want to upgrade their toolchains and still interoperate with those that do. Or random copy and pasting of `.so` files you don't know the provenance of. Everyone must be in sync.
In my opinion, this is a reasonable constraint. It allows Rust to swap out HashMap implementations. In contrast, C++ map types are terrible for performance because they cannot be updated for stability reasons.
Am I wrong?
In some sense, the chasm I'm describing hasn't been crossed by C++ yet
Those folks think it doesn't.
I don't know that.
Here's what I know: the most successful OSes have stable OS ABIs. And their market share is positively correlated with the stability of their ABIs.
Most widely used: Windows, which has a famously stable OS ABI. (If you wanted to be contrarian you could say that it doesn't because the kernel ABI is not stable, but that misses the point - on Windows you program against userland ABIs provided by DLLs, which are remarkably stable.)
Second place: macOS, which maintains ABI stability with some sunsetting of old CPU targets. But release to release the ABI provides solid stability at the framework level, and used to also provide stability at the kernel ABI level (not sure if that's still true - but see above, the important thing is userland framework ABI stability at the end of the day).
Third place: Linux, which maintains excellent kernel ABI stability. Linux has the stablest kernel ABI right now AFAIK. And in userland, glibc has been investing heavily in ABI stability; it's stable enough now that in practice you could ship a binary that dynlinks to glibc and expect it to work on many different Linuxes today and in the future.
So it would seem that OS ABIs are stable in those OSes that are successful.
Leaving aside the platforms it no longer supports.
So there are some changes to account for depending on the deployment scenario.
- the same entity has access to the source of both the library and the main app
- library and main app share the same build tooling
And even if that’s the case, you have the problem of end users accidentally using different versions of the main app and the library and getting unexpected UB.
1. Have the stable ABI be opt-in similarly to how the C ABI is opt-in in Rust (`#[repr(stable)]` or similar)
2. Have the stable ABI be versioned. So it would actually be `#[repr(stable_2026)]` or whatever
They have been working around it with DLLs, and COM/WinRT, but still the tooling isn't ideal.
You can also access .NET/C# objects/interfaces via COM. It has an interface to allow you to get the type metadata but that isn't necessary. This makes it possible to e.g. get the C#/.NET exception stack trace from a C/C++ application.
DCOM is Distributed COM not Dynamic COM[1].
COM does have an interface for dynamic dispatch called IDispatch[2] which is used for scripting languages like VBScript or JScript. It isn't required for Visual Basic though. VB is compiled and supports early binding to interfaces.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_M...
Or maybe we can some how get used to living with static linking. (I don't think so, but many seem to think so in spite of my advice to the contrary!)
Another possibility is to use IPC as the dynamic linking boundary of sorts, but this will consume lots more memory, and as is stated elsewhere in this thread, memory ain't cheap no more.
This means that any Rust ABI would have to cater for link-time specialization. I think this should be doable, but it would require a solution that's better than just to move the code generation into the linker. Instead, one would need to carefully consider the usage of the "shape" of all parameters of a function.
It should extend the C ABI with things like strings, arrays, objects with a way to destruct them, and provide some safety guarantees.
As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.
CLR was going to be the COM Runtime+, and idea was reborn again as Windows team with their anti-.NET bias decided to redo Longhorn in C++, with WinRT.
"Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT"
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
It is also how Android IPC and Apple's XPC kind of get into the picture.
The elephant in the room is that FOSS OSes hardly embrace such solutions.
now to simply get everyone to stop what theyre doing so they can rewrite their c code into this new language, shouldnt be too hard i imagine
> As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.
Yeah, and we had CORBA. Gnome was originally not a DE - the acronym stood for Gnu Network Object Model Environment or similar.
I programmed in CORBA in the 90s. Other than being slower than a snail on weed, I liked it just fine. Maybe it's time for a resurgence of something similar, but without requiring that calls work across networks.
That's not important. What I want to see is the Rewrite-it-in-Rust movement move towards GPL.
GPL is pro-user. MIT is pro-business.
In their zeal to convert, they are happily replacing pro-user software with pro-business software. Their primary goal is to convert, not to safeguard.
If they shifted their goal from spreading Rust to protecting users, I'd be a lot happier about the community.
This is one of the two main reasons I'm not using Rust. Second reason is being addressed by gccrs team, so I have no big gripes there, since they are progressing well.
Thanks for your reply.
It's not comparable - the Rewrite-it-in-Rust community is aiming to replace the existing pro-user products, with new pro-business products.
The last significant online C community was the one that gave us the pro-user products in the first place.
> Surely you see that this makes no sense, yes? Neither Rust-the-language nor Rust-the-ecosystem are any more hostile to GPL than any other language and ecosystem.
I don't care whether or not they are hostile, that is not relevant. What is relevant to the complaints you are reading is that their primary goal is the spread of Rust, not the interests of the users.
It is totally reasonable to be against a community who are working very hard to replace pro-user software with pro-business software.
You mean the OSI, headed by famous C hacker Eric S. Raymond, the permissive-license rebellion against the GPL? Pretending that the MIT/BSD licenses aren't a legacy of the C ecosystem is revisionist history.
> It's not comparable - the Rewrite-it-in-Rust community is aiming to replace the existing pro-user products, with new pro-business products.
It's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. There is no "rewrite-it-in-Rust community", there are just people using Rust and writing what they want. That copyleft licenses have lost mindshare to permissive licenses in the decades since the rise of the OSI is a broader movement in OSS that long predates Rust, and has nothing to do with Rust itself.
Sure, C played a great part there too, but you are ignoring the present.
What we are seeing now is a concerted effort to replace pro-user products with pro-business products.
Even if you re right that the start of Copyleft, with gcc, is revisionist history, that has no relevance to what is happening now, which is a large effort by a specific community to replace pro-user products with pro-business products.
>
Acta, non verba.
Well, that's funny. Considering all the comments I have written for this submission.
First of all, most of the arguments I'd make is already addressed by lelanthran. Do I need to write the same things over and over? It's bad etiquette to write the same things said by someone else. This is why we have the voting mechanism here.
So, since you insist, let me reiterate the same thing.
No I don't refuse to use C, because most of the GPL software which is enabling everything we do today is written in C or a C-descendant language. However, as I write everywhere, I refuse to use Rust because of two reasons:
1- LLVM only for now (I don't use any language which doesn't have a compiler in GCC) 2- Rust's apparent rewrite in rust, in MIT, replace the thing and beat it with a club if it refuses to die attitude.
For reference, uutils and sister projects use "drop-in-replacement" and "completely replace" leisurely, signaling their clear intentions to forcefully replace GPL code with more permissive, business-friendly bits.
I tend to reluctantly accept Rust in the Kernel since gccrs is in the works and progressing steadily, and Rust guys are somewhat forced to write a proper reference for their language and back it with proper PLT, since it's a hard requirement if you want your programming language to be a long-living, dependable one.
Similarly, you use words like courage and non-sequitur leisurely. I'm not sure it's fitting in this instance.
I am not criticising their motives, I am criticising the result!
Also, definitions are hard. It's why we have pro-choice/pro-life and not anti-choice/anti-life - using the positive spin is a good faith characterisation of a position.
In much the same way, I am using pro-user/pro-business; if my intention was to vilify one of those positions I would have used pro-user/anti-user or pro-business/anti-business to label those positions.
No reasonable interpretation of pro-user/pro-business can make the audience think that I am unfairly characterising either of two positions.
I say this to address the use of the word "unsubstantiated" in your assertion about my characterisations.
You buy something physical from a company, say a humanoid unitree robot, a robot actuator or Arm SBC. These pieces of hardware come with their own proprietary SDK that they sell for a significant fee or a proprietary GPU driver without any hope of updates. The SDK heavily uses MIT licensed code and there is no possibility of modifying or inspecting the code for debugging.
From the perspective of the user, the system might as well be 100% proprietary and his freedoms are maximally restricted. You could say that this is fine since it doesn't detract from the original open source project, but you have to remember that these companies would ordinarily have to pay significant development fees to build the same level of functionality and they have no obligation to help or support your project financially. You as the open source developer will then have to beg them to hire you, so you can do paid work that is unrelated to the original project to finally work on your project in your spare time, purely because it is possible to charge for hardware but not the software that the hardware depends on.
What I'm trying to get at here is that this means full vertical integration is the only way. The problem is that most hardware companies are hardware companies first and they don't care about software. They concentrate on making hardware, because each sale brings in money. They don't spend money on software, because it appears to be optional. You can just tell the customer or an open source community to bring their own software. The money that is needed to pay for open source projects flows through the very companies that refuse to spend money on software.
If you want to write open source software, you must be a hardware company so you are customer facing and have access to customer money that can be diverted to the development of the software.
https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...
In practice, very rarely. Lots of 'curl | sh' do secondary fetches, and those don't come with hash checks. And even if they come with hash checks _today_, there is no guarantee next version won't quietly remove them.
...But you could say this about literally every security measure in literally every codebase. At any point, anyone could quietly remove anything that enhances security, or quietly add anything that reduces security. So what's your point?
"static toolchain .tar.gz" means bunch of files you download and manually extract. There may be an install.sh script, but it'll just copy files around, not download extra files. And sometimes install.sh is optional, and tools can be run directly from extraction location.
"curl | bash" means "do whatever developers think gives best experience with minimal prompts", which absolutely means download extra files, but also install system packages, update ~/.bashrc, change system settings and so on.
".run installer" mean interactive installer, Windows-style, often with actual GUI. Often goes into /opt.
"deb file" means "all installed files are managed by apt, and can be examined. /etc conflicts are managed by apt. pre/post install scripts are minimal, and there is a clean uninstall command you can trust to actually work".
You can have deviations - like curl|bash used to pull a deb file or something - but no one likes surprises, so people usually stick to their lanes. If you have .deb files, it might get an officially-specified dependency, more files and maybe a post-inst script, but it won't suddenly start rewriting your .bashrc. Having static toolchain suddenly download files will make many people unhappy, so it likely won't happen either.
(One exception to this rule is enterprise software being packaged into .deb files - Google Chrome surprised everyone when they started to install apt source in their postinst, but many enterprise softwares (cough nomachine cough) do much worse things, like only using apt to unpack their installer file, an dthen running their proprietary install script in postinst)
If Ubuntus Rust replacements aren't adopted in other distributions, or only in some of them, we get an even more fragmented Linux ecosystem. We've already seen this with the sudo-rs (which really should be called something else). It's a sudo replacement, ideal a one to one replacement, but it's not 100% and for how long? You can also think of the Curl provided by Microsoft Powershell, which isn't actually Curl and only partially provides Curl functionality, but it squats the command name.
Ubuntu might accidentally, or deliberately, create a semi-incompatible parallel Linux environment, like Alpine, but worse.
But it's not quite that bad in this particular case - they are fetching pre-built static toolchain, and running old-school install script, just like in 1990s. The social convention for those is quite safer.
(Although I agree, it is pretty ironic that they prefer this to using ppa or binary packaged into deb...)
They did, until the automatic copyright laundering machine was invented. Pretty much every piece of GPL code ever written is now being magically transmuted into MIT/BSD or proprietary code, and the FSF has no solution.
There’s a lot of moral perspective that people apply to this decision, but not all developers have the same goals for their software. MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open.
Sure it does. The original software will always remain open. It isn't like people can somehow take that away.
The gpl is generally considered to stop at the process boundary. I don’t really understand what you could do with a bsd licensed coreutils you couldn’t do with a gpled coreutils. You could make closed source Linux software which called coreutils in a child process. But by most readings of the gpl, you can do that today.
I suppose a company could fork coreutils and make it closed source, keeping their special extra command line options for themselves. But … I guess I just don’t see the value in that. You can already do that with FreeBSD. Apple does exactly that today. And the sky hasn’t fallen. If anything, it would be a relief to many if Apple’s coreutils equivalents were more compatible with gnu coreutils, because then scripts would be more freely portable between Linux and macOS.
MS_dd "$0" $offset $s | eval "gzip -cd" | UnTAR t
MS_dd()
{
blocks=`expr $3 / 1024`
bytes=`expr $3 % 1024`
dd if="$1" ibs=$2 skip=1 obs=1024 conv=sync 2> /dev/null | \
{ test $blocks -gt 0 && dd ibs=1024 obs=1024 count=$blocks ; \
test $bytes -gt 0 && dd ibs=1 obs=1024 count=$bytes ; } 2> /dev/null
}
It sounds to me like you "cross the chasm" a little too early. As a user I don't care about your "chasms" I care about high quality durable systems. This isn't the first time I've heard the "we'll change the std lib later" logic. I've yet to see it actually work.
I'm not sure what this is referring to, but surely it's not referring to Rust. Adding things to the stdlib is way easier than "changing" the stdlib. And Rust adds stuff to the stdlib all the time, like, go read any blog post for a new release and see that there are usually 10+ new additions to the stdlib, which adds up to hundreds of new additions per year due to the six-week release schedule.
I think right now the ecosystem is pretty ripe and with DARPA TRACTOR there are only more and more reasons every day to put rust on your toolbelt.
I am secretly hoping that eventually we break free from the cycle of "hire a senior dev and he likes rust so the company switches" over to hey let's hire some good mid-level and junior rust developers
a glut of junior hires now does not a pretty picture make in the long-term sense
Rust is undoubtedly excellent. What tarnishes the picture is a small group of people that rewrite solid pieces of code into Rust, hijacking the original brand names (eg. "sudo") for the sole purpose of virtue signaling. And the later is why the come after the most stable pieces of software that warrant no rewrite at all, like coreutils.
It seems to me that the right approach would be to ignore those and still love Rust for what nice of a language it is.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu is all in on virtue signaling.
That is the major problem for me… I don’t actually mind that much if a library has bugs… those can always be fixed. But when a library does a total 180 on the API contract, or removes things, or just changes their mind on what the abstraction should be (often it feels like they’re just feng shui’ing things), that’s a major problem. And it’s what people mean when they say “immaturity”: if I build on top of this, is it all going to break horribly at some point in the future when the author changes their mind?
People often say “just don’t update then”, but that’s (a) a sure fire way to accumulate tech debt in your codebase (because some day may come when you must update), and (b) you’re no longer getting what could be critical updates to the library.
Speaking of cryptography, I've given up on setting up a Termux Python dev environment on an old Arm tablet, because some package has a dependency on the 'cryptography' module, which apparently requires the whole Rust toolchain to build. In a Python project. On a platform with limited storage. The documentation suggests pre-built binaries are an option, but I couldn't figure it out the last few times. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Yes, there’s always a couple of people who really push the boat out…
Go has some of these.
Maybe a good middle-ground is something like Rust's regex crate where the best third-party solution gets blessed into a first-party package, but it is still versioned separately from the language.
With Rust, it's an issue at compile-time only. You can then copy the binary around without having to worry about which crates were needed to build it.
Of course, there is the question of trust and discoverability. Maybe Rust would be served by a larger stdlib, or some other mechanism of saying this is a collection of high-quality well maintained libraries, prefer these if applicable. Perhaps the thing the blog post author hints at would be a solution without having to bundle everything into the stdlib, we'll see.
But I'd be somewhat vary of shoveling a lot of stuff into stdlib, it's very hard to get rid of deprecated functionality. E.g. how many command-line argument parsers are there in the python stdlib? 3?
The use case of languages like Rust and C++ is that you can use the same compiler to write both bare-metal unhosted code (non-std for bootloaders, microcontrollers and kernels) and hosted code (uses std structures). As a system programmer that crosses the edge between two environments, I would like to share as much code as possible. Having a big standard library with hosted system assumption is a huge issue. In those cases you want the language works 99% the same and can use the same structs / libraries. Sometimes you also want to write non-std code on hosted environments for things like linkers.
Rust isn't even at the level of maturity of C yet in this regard. Rust's std / core is too big for really memory limited microcontrollers (<64 K space) and requires nasty hacks with weak ABI symbols to make things sane.
Having a huge baggage of std both causes issues like this for the users and also increases maintenance burden of the maintainers. Rust really wants to break its APIs as little as possible and small standard library is a great way to achieve that. C++ suffered a lot from this and it hampered its adoption for C codebases.
Unfortunelly too many modern system programmers never lived in that era, and are completly off on how nice the whole development experience could be like.
There's also something about the early 00s that made software developers go crazy in Java land that they decided to over engineer software for no real benefit and come up with overly complex architectures that don't really address the core issues but rather imagined issues that turn out to not be that important in practice.
Also in the 2010's we had the rise of scripting languages, thus we have a whole generation that never used compiled languages and are now re-discovering systems programming via Rust, Zig and co.
A history lesson, before OOP, there was Yourdon Structured Method, and plenty of C enterprise architects jumped into it.
The GoF book used Smalltalk and C++, predating Java by a couple of years.
The Booch Method used C++, and predates Java for a decade.
Ah and there was that whole operating system written in an OOP C dialect, including its drivers, NeXTSTEP, which also survives to this day, with more consumer deployments than the Year of Desktop Linux.
However, the standard library of a systems language has a special relationship with the compiler. This is the case for C and C++ where the compiler and the standard library also has a special relationship with the platform like GNU or musl with Linux, or MSVC and Windows. It makes changing APIs or modernizing infrastructure almost impossible without creating an entire new OS and porting all compilers and standard libraries to it. Moreover the newer C++ standards actually force you to define such a relationship (with std::initializer_list and threading stuff). It is basically impossible to make an OS-agnostic C++ compiler that doesn't leak its and platform's internals to the user.
Luckily Rust mostly abstracts around the platform-compiler boundary and its standard library so the platform dependencies are implementation details. Unlike C and C++, one can write Rust without caring about how the underlying OS does ABI. However, Rust compiler and Rust std has a special relationship. `Box` can only be defined as part of Rust standard library that's compiled together with the Rust compiler itself. Its special relationship is kind of a blocker for -Zbuild-std and std-aware Cargo which prevents size-optimizing std for embedded systems. Without that magic (i.e. compiling the compiler itself, or worse bootstrapping it) you cannot independently create a `Box`.
I want this kind of library to contain as little as possible since it is convenient to define these kinds of relationships and rely on magic. Modern C++ has too much such magic. Rust is mostly on a correct path with std, core, alloc etc. separations. These kinds of boundaries make it possible to share as much code as possible with many libraries without finding hacky ways around std (which you have to do with C++).
This doesn't mean that I wouldn't appreciate more actual functional libraries maintained by Rust Foundation-funded people and be part of the project or even easily installed. However those libraries should be effortlessly exchangeable. I think current Cargo ecosystem achieves this mostly. However I would appreciate a more curated Cargo repository that contains only a limited set of really well maintained packages (similar to Maven's repos in Java world).
Replacing solid code with vibe code basically, in the name of safety.
sudo-rs for example which is specifically mentioned has a drastically worst safety record than the C sudo.
This noise around rust is aggravating. I loved Rust. Learned and used it from the first book but this garbage propaganda and MIT license thing is annoying so much
A lot of bug fixes/exploits are _CAUSED_ by the C+ core, but still... Tried & true vs new hotness?
rg, fzf, and several others that I can't think have proven to me that rust is the direction going forward.
It’s not so much about the language as it is about the hindsight/developer/project
It seems like Rust is now just the default in all manner of critical systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)
I do get what you mean, but Rust has been baking for a decade, finally took off after 10 years of baking, and now that is been repeatedly tried and tested it is eating the world, as some developers suggested it could eventually do so. I however do think this shows a different problem:
If nobody writes unit tests, how do you write them when you port over projects to ensure your new language doesn't introduce regressions. All rewrites should be preceded by strong useful unit tests.
This is my personal belief on this anyway.
lol, you got me. Stupid old brain not calculating time correctly.
Partially is in fact true: Just because the Rust use a better type system (after ML) + better resource model (aka borrow checker), and if you are decently good, you eliminate, forever!, tons of problems.
It can't solve things that arise by complex interactions or just lack of port subtle details like in parsing poor inputs (like html) but is true that changing the language in fact solve tons of things.
*so long as you dont use unsafe rust
**unsafe rust required for systems programming
***rust is a systems language
****does changing a default actually solve anything?
They weren't? Isn't it obvious that it's not easy because the challenge isn't literally adding dependencies to a file, but before that - finding/evaluating which of the alternative dependencies to add?
But anyway, that's a very shallow and wrong summary of what happened, the link itself has plenty of grounded non-hateful objections to the proposal, which would be as valid now as they were then.
- SNAP which is only managed and supported by them
- Tried to reinvent the wheel with sudo-rs
- They are heavily focused into cloud, servers and business
- Following the Rust hype train
I used Ubuntu for 13y or so, it is a Windows within Linux world. Bloated, kernel panic, heavy, privacy issues.
Debian still the king to be used as servers, Mint Cinnamon is the king for desktop, gaming, video editing, 3D design, coding,it just works.
Mint LMDE great too. Builds upon a Debian base, instead of Ubuntu.
> - Tried to reinvent the wheel with sudo-rs
Upstart, Mir, Launchpad, Bazaar, Unity, Juju...
reinvent how? sudo-rs and a bunch of others are maintained by: https://trifectatech.org/ a non profit registered in Netherlands
Also Solaris and Aix are my favourite UNIX flavours.
The time to write M$ on my email signature during the 1990's is long gone.
Perhaps one of the best ways to achieve that goal is to not introduce any discontinuity? Like, take coreutils. It's one of the most stable pieces of Linux infrastructure. It's as solid as it gets. No one asked for rewrite of those in any language. No one wanted a rewrite. No one needed a rewrite. The rewrite serves no purpose[1].
[1] Credit where it's due: this rust slop prompted a creation of test suite for coreutils, which is truly a great achievement, hands down.
Ubuntu was always "let's just fuck up what just works in Debian" but this is another level, I have no idea why they are rushing it
Distros using Ubuntu as base should reconsider.
This means Canonical can offer proprietary patches on top of these packages and sell them as part of their "enterprise" offerings and this gives me the ick.
Note that the rust having no stable api is not fixed, so I think there's a bunch of internal systems on each platform to hard lock the rust dependencies across multiple rust users.
There's some friction between platform packagers and the code that the author wrote exactly as it was written.
I've switched to using Rust from Python simply because of AI development
Many things that would only be caught at runtime in other languages are caught at compile time in Rust, making coding agents iterate until things compile and work well.
Rust also has great error messages, which help the agents in fixing compilation errors.
You probably don't realise this, but AI written Rust (or any language) will have much more undefined behaviour than human-written C.
AI coding brings non-determinism to every language; with AI, now every language can have Undefined Behaviour.