Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo [LWN.net]

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 11, 2021 5:28 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
In reply to: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo by BirAdam
Parent article: Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

> Rust is being promoted as a systems language when it doesn’t work on all of the hardware needed by a systems language.

Who gets to define which hardware needs to be supported for a language to be "a systems language"?

When gcc drops support for a CPU architecture, does that mean "systems languages" no longer need to support that hardware? Did someone appoint the gcc maintainers as the guardians who get to define what it means to be "a systems language"?

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Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 11, 2021 6:12 UTC (Thu) by jalla (guest, #101175) [Link] (3 responses)

no, but when gcc drops support for the language you're still able to build C software for the target. brcm still ships gcc4 as the primary toolchain, as an example. Many others additionally ship gcc4 as the primary toolchain. Requiring software that never existed to build software for real systems (like s390x) is preposterous and missing the $ of the market.

What has happened here is the epitome of the python mindset, which is "if it doesn't impact me, it doesn't matter". I'm not going to take a stance on if this is right or wrong, but it's actively harmful against users.

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 11, 2021 6:54 UTC (Thu) by StillSubjectToChange (guest, #128662) [Link]

"Requiring software that never existed to build software for real systems (like s390x) is preposterous and missing the $ of the market."

Rust supports the s390x as a Tier 2 platform, Gentoo just doesn't have packages for it yet. However, Rust does not support the s390 and neither has Linux since 2015. Besides, if a company bought an IBM mainframe then they shouldn't be making *any* complaints about support from open source projects.

"I'm not going to take a stance on if this is right or wrong, but it's actively harmful against users."

Realistically it isn't very many users. If a platform is so anemic that it doesn't have an LLVM backend and isn't implementing one, then it's functionally abandoned.

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 11, 2021 9:07 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> brcm still ships gcc4 as the primary toolchain, as an example

Which means that the same complaints would arise for using any C features that GCC 4 doesn't support, such as most C11 features.

I remember seeing complaints when projects dropped support for pre-C89 compilers. Those complaints don't make it reasonable to keep K&R C support forever.

> Requiring software that never existed to build software for real systems (like s390x)

Rust supports s390x. It sounds like Gentoo didn't ship Rust for that platform.

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo

Posted Feb 11, 2021 14:07 UTC (Thu) by banana (guest, #144773) [Link]

LLVM supports s390x. It doesn’t support s390, which hasn’t been manufactured in 21 years.