Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 8:21 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by khim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

However, in C-land (which works well with the FORTRAN compile first, then link model), an ABI-unstable dynamic library still appears to work OK; as long as you don't accidentally remove or break an exported symbol, you get the disk space and memory savings of dynamic linking, and you get an apparent ability to rebuild the shared object with newer (bug fixed) code and swap it in for the old version.

There are still two orthogonal reasons for dynamic linking:

To have code that's used in many binaries exist once on the system, saving disk space and memory via CoW.
To allow you to replace a shared object with a newer version in order to improve performance and fix bugs present in the older version.

Without an explicitly stable ABI, you can't reliably get #2 - at any time, a surprise ABI change can mean that the two shared objects are no longer equivalent from the perspective of your existing binaries. But you still get #1 - less memory used by running programs because the shared code is all in shared objects that are CoW and read-only.

Getting the first just requires the tooling to support it, and is a matter of coming up with a workable design for doing #1 without compromising on modern features like generics. Getting the second also needs developer buy-in; no amount of tooling helps if you keep a symbol unchanged, but completely alter its semantics. And the first is a requirement for the second; I can't build a stable dynamic link ABI if the tooling won't let me build a dynamic library.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 9:38 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If you don't have stable ABIs then savings from COW rarely materialize. Simply because different programs end up with different DSOs anyway.

Sure, if may still get that benefit for OS-supplied programs, but in todays' world where even low-end system gave gigabytes of RAM it's not very important.

And where it is important (embedded, e.g.) you would get bigger savings if you would just combine multiple binaries into one. Bosubox was written in C yet it's usually compiled as one binary anyway.

Thus solving dynamic linking problem without solving ABI stability problem incurs high costs yet doesn't buy you much.

And the fact that you can't solve stability ABI without developer's buy-in makes the issues easier to handle different issues, too.

Think Windows, platform with most third-party plugins implemented as dynamic libraries (Android and iOS have more apps today, but very-very few of them use or support third-party plugins): global variables can not be shared, there are no common libc (thus you need to keep track of different versions of malloc/free) and so on.

Similarly in Rust: if we don't plan to make the ability to build any module as share library the goal then we can significantly simplify that task and from practical POV there would be little difference.