Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 8:36 UTC (Sun) by joib (subscriber, #8541)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by ncm
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> That the Unix Wars carried on with BSD in the background throughout relieves us of any need to speculate. We saw.

It was a different world back then, and further doesn't prove that the superior development model of Linux rather than the license, or uncertainty due to the lawsuits, was the key factor.

> Had Gcc not been copyleft, we would have seen identically the same balkanization in compilers, with each ISA's owner fielding its own proprietary, binary-only Gcc variant.

> What we got instead was that to field a new ISA without providing Gcc patches would be instant death. That x86 in the end wiped out all but ARM *anyway* is a whole other story,

And today LLVM is roughly on par with GCC, and the feared for balkanization hasn't happened. There are some proprietary forks of LLVM, but largely nobody cares about those. Any architecture that wants to be taken seriously needs to have both GCC and LLVM support.

> (I am ready for Risc-6 already, taking RISC-V and walking back its less fortunate choices.)

As far as ISA's go, I think aarch64 is pretty nice. You just have to go convince ARM to 'open source' it. :)

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 13:13 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> And today LLVM is roughly on par with GCC, and the feared for balkanization hasn't happened. There are some proprietary forks of LLVM, but largely nobody cares about those. Any architecture that wants to be taken seriously needs to have both GCC and LLVM support.

Nobody cares, except, of course, for those who have to actually _use_ those forks.

A few years ago I actually had five different LLVM-based compilers installed onto my $dayjob workstation. Only one had source provided, the rest were proprietary, and as such I was entirely dependent on the vendor to fix bugs and otherwise provide updates that the Distro-supplied one received on a routine basis.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 16:25 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

What has happened since the ISA wars is that introducing a new ISA is, itself, instant death. So, the existing compiler compiles code for everything, and new chips run code it already produces.