Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Posted May 21, 2022 21:06 UTC (Sat) by chuckwolber (subscriber, #138181)
Parent article: Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

"... about 5700 lines of code from various third parties that manipulates files, directories, and environment variables, and runs other programs on my machine every time I do a build."

"... one fix to this would be to re-configure our build system to run in some sort of a chroot environment or a virtual machine that fixes the paths in a way that almost anyone else could reproduce"

Those problems (and more) are why bitbake is such a powerful embedded build tool. It is inconceivable to me that Bunnie has not yet encountered and spent time evaluating Yocto/OpenEmbedded, so I am very curious what his objections are.

Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Posted May 22, 2022 18:47 UTC (Sun) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Actually it can be quite conceivable. I know lots of OS developers who even work in embedded who have not done anything deeper with Yocto than dropping in a .bb file someone else wrote. And then there the ones still doing things 'hardcore' embedded or look at it and say 'well yeah, but I already do that with my own crafted Gentoo'. The yocto method is very cool and has a lot of ways of doing things well for this usecase.. however, the method is different enough that a lot of 'complaints' usually are just having to bend your usual way of doing things into the build system.

Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Posted May 23, 2022 12:18 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

"... about 5700 lines of code from various third parties that manipulates files, directories, and environment variables, and runs other programs on my machine every time I do a build."

I understand that ~~paranoid~~security-conscious developers don't like this. But this is not specific for these "new" languages. I mean in how does someone install software written in C? Downloads some .tar.gz from somewhere, untars it, then executes ./configure. The generated (i.e. write-only) configure script creates files, calls the compiler, executes random stuff, etc. Then make will also manipulate files, environment variables, etc. This is not a new problem - maybe the environment is new, but those generated Makefiles are as much opaque as the auto-executed code in those crates.

Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Posted May 23, 2022 13:18 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I haven't worked with vanilla Yocto/OpenEmbedded, but I spent a painful 18 months dealing with Petalinux from Xilinx (based on Yocto) and I'm scarred for life. I'll be happy never to touch it again, which is very likely since I stopped doing embedded development in 2020.

Bitbake is indeed powerful... but the various recipes and ways of overriding them are badly-documented and filled with magic. Most vendors' layers are full of opaque recipes and zillions of variables whose meanings are not very clear.