ABI stability funding [LWN.net]

ABI stability funding

Posted Dec 2, 2025 8:44 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: ABI stability funding by khim
Parent article: APT Rust requirement raises questions

As a Rust user anything that causes more failures at runtime that could instead be compile time failures would be something I would definitely strongly oppose.

to post comments

ABI stability funding

Posted Dec 2, 2025 10:21 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

We are talking about Rust, not Haskell, here. Uses of extern "C" definitely generates more problems at runtime that higher-level interface ever could — only they generate random crashes, not predictable panics.

In the past for things like integer overflow or array access Rust usually picked up panics in place of UB, but with stable ABI approach is the opposite.

That looks a bit illogical to me, but then, people are not always rational.

ABI stability funding

Posted Dec 9, 2025 0:37 UTC (Tue) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link]

The current convention for static linking avoids this. If dynamic linking became more common in Rust, making a missing library a compile time error may not be possible, but it would be nice to at least be a link time error.