Re: Rust freedom issue claim

[Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl>]

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.

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.