Rust is the present and the future and it's quite logical that it becomes a key requirement in Linux distributions, but I'm really not convinced by the wording here… This last sentence feels needlessly antagonistic.
A nostalgia-fuelled Linux distro, maybe using a deliberately slimmed down or retro kernel, and chosen software could make a lot more sense than keep trying to squeeze Debian onto hardware that was already obsolete at the turn of the century while also promoting Debian as a viable choice for a brand new laptop.
alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4
To be fair, lots of people did use Motorola 68xxx CPUs when those were new, it's just that it was 40+ years ago in products like the Commodore Amiga. The SH4 is most popularly connected to the Dreamcast, Sega's video game console from back when Sega made video game consoles.
The Alpha and PA Risc were seen in relatively recent and more conventional hardware, but in much tinier numbers, and when I say relatively I mean early this century, these are not products anybody bought five years ago, and when they were on sale they were niche products for a niche which in practical terms was eaten by Microsoft.
> Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv).
Wonder what this means for those architectures then?
https://mastodon.social/@juliank
>Senior Engineer at Canonical.
They will be rebranded as "retro computing devices"
(LLVM even used to have an in-tree DEC Alpha backend, though that was back in 2011 and not relevant to any version of Rust.)
[0] Looks like there is basic initial support but no 'core' or 'std' builds yet. https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/m68k-unknow... This should potentially be fixable.
But the people who use the language have an amazing talent to make people on the fence hate them within half a dozen sentences.
They remind me of Christian missionaries trying to convert the savages from their barbarous religions with human sacrifice to the civilised religion with burning heretics.
Makes you think, huh?
Rust people for some reason are.
There is no guarantee that other bugs do not flurish in the rust echosystem. There are no publicly known quality code checks of rust programs except a big "trust us"(see firefox with all its CVEs, despite "rust"). And combined with the Cargo echosystem, where every malicious actor can inject malware is a big warning sign.
If I got that right, how is "it's still not perfect" an argument?
Agree with the Cargo objection.
> There is no guarantee that other bugs do not flurish in the rust echosystem.
well, less likely than in C thanks to a advanced type system, e.g. allowing authors of abstractions make their API much more fool proof.
> where every malicious actor can inject malware is a big warning sign.
Very much doubt that is the case...
And just an anecdote, Asahi Linux devs said that Rust made it very easy (maybe relative to working with C) to write the drivers for the Apple M1 and M2 series, so it seems that the language has his merits, even without the cargo ecosystem.
Also Rust will only minimize certain kinds of bugs, others are impossible, a few years ago (I believe was Microsoft) that said that 70% of the bugs found were memory related [0], it means that Rust would have prevented most of those.
Maybe Rust is not the best answer, but as for now it the most proven answer for this particular problem, who know of Zig or other language will replace both C and Rust in the future.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-ditched-linux-for-windows-11...
Fast forward 5 centuries, it turns out they were in fact pretty successful as South America central Africa are the places where Catholicism is the most active today, far more than in Europe.
It's insane that x86 Debian is still compiling all software targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).
x64 Debian is a bit more modern, and you must splurge for a CPU from 2005 (Prescott) to get the plethora of features it requires
The cost of supporting this old hardware for businesses or hobbyists isn’t free. The parties that feel strongly that new software continue to be released supporting a particular platform have options here, ranging from getting support for those architectures in LLVM and Rust, pushing GCC frontends for rust forward, maintaining their own fork of apt, etc.
See (relatively recent) list of manfuacturers here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers
and scroll down for other categories of x86 chip manufacturers. These have plenty of uses. Maybe in another 30 years' time they will mostly be a hobby, but we are very far from that time.
But you are also completely ignoring limited-capabilities hardware, like embedded systems and micro-controllers. That includes newer offerings from ST Microelectronics, Espressif, Microchip Technology etc. (and even renewed 'oldies' like eZ80's which are compatible with Zilog's 8-bit Z80 from the 1970s - still used in products sold to consumers today). The larger ones are quite capable pieces of hardware, and I would not be surprised if some of them use Debian-based OS distributions.
aka "hype-driven programming" where "retro computing devices" are defined as "all platforms our shiny new toys don't support".
I would be worried if even C++ dependencies were added for basic system utilities, let alone something like Rust.
Now, granted, I'm not an expert on distro management, bootstrapping etc. so maybe I'm over-reacting, but I am definitely experiencing some fear, uncertainty and doubt here. :-(
This is the status quo and always has been. gcc has plenty of extensions that are not part of a language standard that are used in core tools. Perl has never had a standard and is used all over the place.
For example, IIUC, you can build a perl interpreter using a C compiler and GNU Make. And if you can't - GCC is quite bootstrappable; see here for the x86 / x86_64 procedure:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/65708958/1593077
and you can get into that on other platforms anywhere along the bootstrapping chain. And then you can again easily build perl; see:
https://codereflections.com/2023/12/24/bootstrapping-perl-wi...
Here's a thread of them insulting upstream developers & users of the Debian packages. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10725
Furthermore, if these architectures are removed from further debian updates now, is there any indication that, once there's a rust toolchain supporting them, getting them back into modern debian wouldn't be a bureaucratic nightmare?
CartwheelLinux•2h ago
Much of the language used seems to stem from nauseating interactions that have occured in kernel world around rust usage.
I'm not a big fan of rust for reasons that were not brought up during the kernel discussions, but I'm also not an opponent of moving forward. I don't quite understand the pushback against memory safe languages and defensiveness against adopting modern tooling/languages
lelanthran•2h ago
If you could separate the language from the acolytes it would have seen much faster adoption.
kaoD•1h ago
Rust haters seem strangely obsessed.
lelanthran•41m ago
Well, this is a great example. People complaining about the community are labeled as people complaining about the language.
Do you not see the problem here?
testdelacc1•1h ago
That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless.
Rust is already pretty successful adoption wise. It’s powering significant parts of the internet, it’s been introduced in 3 major operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android), many successful companies in a variety of domains have written their entire tech stack in it. Adoption as measured by crates.io downloads has doubled every year for the last 10 years.
Now I’m imagining how much more widely Rust would be used if they had adopted your visionary approach of never saying anything positive about it.
lelanthran•34m ago
No, it's the people who have given rise to the multiple Rust memes over the years.
I'm battling to think of any other about-to-go-mainstream language that had the reputation of a hostile community. Scala? Kotlin? Swift? Zig? None of those languages have built such poor reputations for their communities.
After all, for quite a few years every thread on forums that mentioned C or C++ was derailed by Rust proponents. I didn't see C++ users jumping into Rust threads posting attacks, but there are many examples of Rust users jumping into C++ or C threads, posting attacks.
> That’s an interesting thought. It would run counter to everything we know about human nature, but interesting nevertheless.
Well, the fact that Rust is an outlier in this sample should tell you everything you need to know; other up-and-coming languages have not, in the past, gotten such a reputation.
testdelacc1•27m ago
Because you’re young or you weren't around in 2010 when Go was gaining adoption. Same shit back then. People said “I like the language, it’s quite useful” followed by tirades from people who thought it was the end of human civilisation. It had exactly the reputation you speak of. (“DAE generics???”)
Eventually the haters moved on to hating something else. That’s what the Rust haters will do as well. When Zig reaches 1.0 and gains more adoption, the haters will be out in full force.
uecker•2h ago
Mond_•1h ago
Really? As opposed to e.g. C or C++ (as the most important languages which Rust is competing with)? Sure, taste plays into everything, but I think a lot of people work with Rust since it's genuinely a better tool.
I hear you on free software being controlled by corporate interests, but that's imo a separate discussion from how good Rust is as a language.
noosphr•1h ago
Of course most people aren't smart enough for the language so they have to use inferior algol languages like rust.
AlotOfReading•1h ago
noosphr•1h ago
This is someone who says things like
>It's important for the project as whole to be able to move forward and rely on modern tools and technologies and not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices.
While on company time.
Antibabelic•1h ago
pjmlp•1h ago
einpoklum•1h ago
you see, GP did not speak in relative terms, but absolutely: They believe Rust has problems. They did not suggest that problems with programming languages are basically all fungible, that we should sum up all problems, compare different languages, and see which ones come out on top.
mirashii•1h ago
Nobody is being forced out of the community, you can fork and not adopt the changes if you want. Thats the real point of free software, that you have the freedom to make that choice. The whole point of free software was never that the direction of the software should be free from corporate control in some way, the maintainers of a project have always had the authority to make decisions about their own project, whether individual or corporate or a mix.
throwingrocks•1h ago
This hasn’t changed.
crote•49m ago
Well, what's the alternative? The memory safety problem is real, I don't think there is any doubt about that.
C/C++ is a dead end: the community has thoroughly rejected technical solutions like the Circle compiler, and "profiles" are nothing more than a mirage. They are yet again trying to make a magical compiler which rejects all the bad code and accepts all the good code without making any code changes, which of course isn't going to happen.
Garbage collection is a huge dealbreaker for the people still on C/C++. This immediately rules out the vast majority of memory-safe languages. What is left is pretty much only Zig and Rust. Both have their pros and cons, but Rust seems to be more mature and has better community adoption.
The way I see it, the pro-memory-safety crowd is saying "There's a giant hole in our ship, let's use Rust to patch it", and the anti-Rust crowd yells back "I don't like the color of it, we shouldn't repair the hole until someone invents the perfect solution". Meanwhile, the ship is sinking. Do we let the few vocal Rust haters sink the ship, or do we tell them to shut up or show up with a better alternative?
zozbot234•42m ago
> Garbage collection is a huge dealbreaker for the people still on C/C++.
The problem is not so much GC itself, but more like pervasive garbage collection as the only memory management strategy throughout the program. Tracing GC is a legit memory management strategy for some programs or parts of a program.
mrkeen•16m ago
This assumes there wasn't agreement.
And if so, what would 'eventually adopted by the majority' mean. Is this announcement not that?
tcfhgj•1h ago
Apparently, Rust is part of the "woke agenda"
hofrogs•1h ago
alt187•49m ago
Personally, I'm simply bothered by the fact that (one of?) the most famous figure of Rust on Linux and Rust Forever consumes and advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community.
From what I could piece together, the only group who ever cried wolf about this is a forum full of contemptious little angry men who spend weeks researching people they hate on the internet. No one seems to want to touch the subject from fear of being associated with them.
I'll give it to you, this is not a great time.
TheChaplain•1h ago
Ygg2•1h ago
mrweasel•1h ago
If Rust should be the language of choice, preferably not. The syntax is awful, the language is complicated and Rust programs seems to collect dependencies at the same rate as JavaScript. Where I might agree with you is that Rust seems to attract a certain type of people. They write absolutely brilliant software, but like the Rust compile, they are rather particular with what input they'll accept.
In the end I don't really care what apt is written in, I'm not the one writing the code. I just use the tool. It would be sad if some platforms are left behind, because the Rust developers don't care about them and not because they're no longer useful.
hulitu•50m ago
Yes. It is. Just write the code and show us that it is good.
bmicraft•58m ago
At least it looks that way to my not-rust-using self
hulitu•51m ago
As far as i read on HN, the only memory safe language discused on HN is rust and mostly with childish pro arguments.
zozbot234•49m ago
kaoD•3m ago