Defining the Rust 2024 edition

Posted Jan 31, 2024 16:48 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Defining the Rust 2024 edition by paulj
Parent article: Defining the Rust 2024 edition

> And have been doing a good job. We havn't had to suffer libC "upgrade everything on your computer" flag days since Glibc... 2.0 (?) I think - which IVR was the first glibc to really get shipped by distros (there might have been a bleeding edge release of RHL with a pre-release Glibc (1.99?)

Linux didn't UPGRADE to glibc2, it CHANGED to glibc2.

Before that we had libc5, which was a completely different libc. I bang on about WordPerfect, but the native linux WP was a libc5 beast. So I gather you can still force it to run, but it's a lot of work.

Cheers,
Wol

Defining the Rust 2024 edition

Posted Jan 31, 2024 17:10 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I'm well aware. Like I said, I remember changing from libc.so.5 to Glibc 2.

Libc.so.5 was a "Upgrade everything on your computer" type libc though. Any major updates to it would have required updating most of your Linux box. That this didn't happen was only because Linux libc lasted only a relative short period of time, as a stop-gap fork of an earlier Glibc 1.

That I and others "changed" from Linux libc to Glibc 2.0, to gain symbol versioned libc - which then meant "upgrade your entire distro" was largely avoided (there was some foible in compatibility with an ancillary library around Glibc 2.2 IVR) - is kind of irrelevant. Cause it would equally have required a complete distro upgrade to have "upgraded" Linux libc to a symbol versioned one. And anyway, Linux libc /was/ GNU libc.

Without symbol versioning, as in the Linux libc days, we would have had to have suffered "flag day" upgrades, updating your entire OS for any ABI fixes to core (heavily depended upon) libraries.