Possible Distributions quote of the year

Posted Jan 24, 2025 18:29 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (guest, #17118)
In reply to: Possible Distributions quote of the year by mb
Parent article: Distributions quote of the week

Strange argument about Rust providing stable C ABI. C provides C ABI, because it is C. No one is talking about C providing, let's say, stable Pascal ABI.

To be equal with C, Rust would have to provide a stable RUST ABI. The lack of it is the crux of the discussion, isn't it?

Rust has to provide stable ABI to fit in with how the software is distributed nowadays (by Linux distributions). Without stable ABI it's just immature curiosity, working against decades of good practices.

Possible Distributions quote of the year

Posted Jan 24, 2025 18:57 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

> The lack of it is the crux of the discussion, isn't it?

Nope. The lack of knowledge about Rust and at the same time the presence of very verbose FUD spreading is the crux of the discussion.

> Without stable ABI it's just immature curiosity, working against decades of good practices.

FUD, once again.

Please educate yourself about what ABI means w.r.t. modern languages like Rust and why decades of "good practices" mean nothing for modern languages.
And by "modern languages" I mean C++ with templates, for example.

Possible Distributions quote of the year

Posted Jan 24, 2025 19:08 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

This branch of the discussion too.

Meaning of "C" ABI

Posted Jan 25, 2025 9:36 UTC (Sat) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note that what Rust calls the "C" ABI isn't actually the C ABI; rather it's a sane interpretation of the psABI for your platform in terms of Rust constructs, chosen so that where there's multiple choices, the chosen option maps to what most C compilers for that platform will choose. It's just that if you called it the psABI, people would get confused (most of us don't look into this level of detail), whereas calling it the "C ABI" helps people's intuition, even though it's as accurate as calling Linux a Solaris-alike.