Architecture support

Posted Sep 16, 2021 22:38 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Architecture support by corbet
Parent article: The Rust for Linux project

Does it NEED to work on all the platforms?

If they start off writing code that will only be run on supported platforms, it doesn't need to run on the others.

If there's a "rust to C" translator (I believe there is), then they can use that for unsupported platforms.

And as rust gains a foothold, it will provide pressure for the list of supported platforms to grow.

These things don't burst on the scene fully-fledged - linux didn't, why should rust?

What's that saying? If you don't evolve you die? Maybe rust is the next evolution for linux? Maybe it isn't, but don't put artificial obstacles in the way - you should know linux well enough to know it will evolve around and past you if you try to set up a road-block.

Cheers,
Wol

Architecture support

Posted Sep 16, 2021 22:39 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Whoops, sorry Jon, I know you know that, but this seems to be a negative meme that too many people jump on.

Cheers,
Wol

Architecture support

Posted Sep 21, 2021 6:00 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I predict that the world won't suddenly end once it's in... and the ones complaining loudest will probably go on for some time as if it still wasn't.

Most old/exotic platforms aren't plug-and-play anyway; even if every new peripheral and PCIe card going forward had a pure-Rust driver it's unlikely to affect anyone on m68k, mips, alpha etc.

(The kernel's already got plenty of platform-limited compiler-dependent stuff anyway: LLVM LTO and GCC hardening plugins come to mind - those two are even mutually exclusive!)