Re: The Case for Rust (in the base system)

Hello Rob,

> What I actually want though is high-quality tools to make the kind of
> problems I need to solve easier for my puny human brain to manage. Rust
> is an approach to solving some of these kinds of problems. Other
> approaches exist, have existed, and will exist in the future.

I'm interested in your opinion. Do the tools like PROMELA-SPIN used for some (critical) part of a C-sourced project  will  give more  correctness and less error prone compared to rewriting project in Rust?
Is there an actual possibility to make such a tools integral part of project?

Wednesday, September 4, 2024, 11:03:13 AM, you wrote:

> On 03.09.2024 11:31, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>> But first and foremost:  There has to be a good enough reason.

> This is a near-enough hook for me to hitch a couple of thoughts on to :)

> I work on ZFS, primarily on Linux with slowly increasing amounts on
> FreeBSD too. By a long way, the kind of work that is the slowest and
> most complicated is around complex locking sequences across multiple
> threads. In most of these, getting it wrong leads to some kind of data
> corruption that is usually impossible to track down.

> The appeal of Rust for me, as for many, is that there are ways to encode
> those kind of sequencing rules into the type system so that the compiler
> can tell you where you got it wrong. But, I don't actually want Rust _as
> such_. I like it a lot, I've written useful programs in Rust over the
> last decade, and I'd be perfectly happy to use it in kernel and
> filesystem development if it was available.

> What I actually want though is high-quality tools to make the kind of
> problems I need to solve easier for my puny human brain to manage. Rust
> is an approach to solving some of these kinds of problems. Other
> approaches exist, have existed, and will exist in the future.

> This is mostly aimed at the "C is totally fine" crowd. I like C, and I'm
> pretty good at it, but it absolutely not good enough for many kinds of
> software. Frankly, I find "just get better at C" to be the most
> infuratingly facile "argument" against Rust.

> (And I would _love_ to get better at C. If substantially better C tools
> are out there (on whatever axis you like to measure that on), then
> they're either not visible to me, or they're not usable or
> well-integrated enough to be in my standard kit).

> There's plenty of plausible reasons not to include Rust in the base
> system, many of them being discussed on this list, and I'm learning a
> lot reading along. Just please don't pretend the problems it's trying to
> solve aren't real.

> Cheers,
> Rob.

> --
> Rob Norris | robn.au | robn@despairlabs.com

> Working on OpenZFS, because there's a lot of data out there and it'd be
> nice not to lose any of it.



-- 
Best regards,
Anthony Pankov