Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 29, 2022 6:45 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: Packaging Rust for Fedora by smoogen
Parent article: Packaging Rust for Fedora

Rust is 12 years old. Version 1.0 was released in 2015. It's not a new language anymore.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 29, 2022 10:24 UTC (Sat) by sbakker (subscriber, #58443) [Link] (3 responses)

> Rust is 12 years old. Version 1.0 was released in 2015.

Er, welcome to 2027? (You might want to check your clocks.)

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 29, 2022 10:41 UTC (Sat) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (2 responses)

Rust existed before version 1.0. The public announcement by Mozilla was 12 years ago (2010), after several years of private work by Graydon Hoare. Version 1.0 in 2015 was the first stable release, with a guarantee that code written for 1.0 will remain compatible with any future release, so it was considered reasonably mature by that point.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 30, 2022 12:49 UTC (Sun) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link] (1 responses)

Ironically, I can still compile some of my Rust 1.0 code from 2015 using modern compilers, just by running "cargo build". When I can't compile it, 90% of the trouble is typically caused by a C dependency, OpenSSL. OpenSSL breaks source and binary compatibility relatively often, and it's had plenty of urgent security updates. So when I rebuild old code, I often need to update the networking libraries to something modern.

It's actually difficult to maintain 100% source compatibility over most of a decade. If you download sufficiently old C and C++ sources, they often require a bunch of tweaking to build.

But overall, Rust has done a fantastic job of maintaining source compatibility over time. Thanks to the "editions" system, it's possible to mix libraries using Rust 2015 with libraries using Rust 2021.

My general strategy for deploying Rust binaries on Linux is to use musl-libc, and depend on nothing except the kernel APIs and the system cert store. This works especially well in mixed environments, where I need to support both Ubuntu and Alpine-based Linux containers, which don't have glibc.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Nov 1, 2022 9:19 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Years ago we switched Pernosco to use rustls for everything. We have "cargo deny" rules to make sure we don't accidentally depend on OpenSSL ever again. Never regretted that move.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 30, 2022 10:28 UTC (Sun) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a bit misleading to point to pre-1.0 versions of Rust, given some of the massive changes that took place in the lead-up to promising stability.

For example, in 2013, they switched from compiler-privileged sigils to standard library types for things like Arc<T> and, in 2014, they removed the green threading runtime that had been helping to encourage people to draw comparisons with Go.

Rust as the "great interop with C and a higher-level systems programming language" language we know today didn't truly exist until late 2014 or early 2015.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 30, 2022 17:41 UTC (Sun) by nevyn (guest, #33129) [Link] (1 responses)

If you dare to evaluate the language on the documentation and tutorials/examples ... it's even newer than that. I remember looking at rust seriously just after 1.0, and the documentation was challenging ... quickly looking much more recently the situation had improved a lot (maybe even completely fixed).

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 30, 2022 23:29 UTC (Sun) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link]

I've been using Rust since 1.0 (I lurked in /r/rust until the stability promise came into play, then started writing code once I could trust it would remain compilable), so my perspective on that could be a bit skewed.

Yes, Rust 1.0 was quite spartan... but you can still compile what you wrote for it in modern Rust assuming you don't fall into one of the exceptions like "this code only compiled because of a compiler bug".