Re: Rust freedom issue claim

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@dismail.de>]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

> On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 04:32:03PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> That’s a somewhat different topic.  FWIW, I’m both excited at the idea
>> of having a memory-safe replacement for C gaining momentum, and
>> frightened by the prospects of Rust being this replacement, for many
>> reasons including: Rust does not have a good bootstrapping story, as we
>> know all too well, Cargo encourages sloppy package distribution à la
>> npm, Rust in the kernel would give a false sense of safety (it’s still
>> that big monolithic blob!), and the Rust community is very much
>> anti-copyleft.
>
> Having adopted Rust for some of our bioinformatics work, I can fully
> agree. It is actually hard to use Rust without Cargo and it is an
> implosion npm-style waiting to happen if the most trivial program
> already imports 100+ external packages - some of doubtful quality.
>
> Another thing I have against Rust is its syntax - but that is
> (arguably) taste. I can't believe references are written with an
> ampersand - and they are so common it is in your face all the time.
> That is just noise. And sometimes the borrow checker really gets in
> the way (and I pine for GC). We are sticking with Rust though because
> the compiler works hard and is a sucker for detail, so it helps both
> less and more experienced programmers to avoid C/C++ traps. Also Rust
> has no OOP that people can use - I am very happy about that. In short
> it is a fairly pragmatic FP language with some nice compile time
> features. I don't love it but it is an OK compromise.

In terms of languages trying to be replacements for C:

- Zig is one of the most famous ones, and will probably be the first C
  alternatives to reach 1.0.  https://ziglang.org/

- Odin https://odin-lang.org/

- scopes which using S-expressions  https://sr.ht/~duangle/scopes/

- Drew Devault's (creator or sway) secret programming language.  It may
  be the second language on this list to reach 1.0

>
> For kernels I completely agree with you. Memory safety is a red
> herring because we face much deeper problems. Open hardware and
> message passing is the way forward.
>
> Oh, did you know Rust expands all sources into one 'blob' for
> compilation? At the crate level. It led to the meme: "The Rust
> programming language compiles fast software slowly."
>
> I have not hit real issues yet with compilation speed, but it feels
> like we regressed to huge C++ template expansion...
>
>> Guix, related projects such as Mes, Gash, and the Shepherd, together
>> with the Hurd, offer a very different and (to me) more appealing vision
>> for a user-empowering, safer, more robust, and yet POSIX-compliant OS.
>
> Good architecture is far more important than a borrow checker.
>
> Pj.
>

--
Joshua Branson (joshuaBPMan in #guix)
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