Re: What rust claims about FreeBSD support (as an example involved in picking languages)

On 11 Sep 2024, at 04:22, Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> An issue for my example (rust) is that as long as FreeBSD
> has aarch64 as Tier 1 in FreeBSD terms, might it be that
> the rust Tier 3 status of aarch64-unknown-freebsd could
> be a problem? Can FreeBSD cover the gap or lead rust to
> change the rust Tier 3 status to, say, rust Tier 2 with
> Host Tools for aarch64, matching x86_64-unknown-freebsd ?

I think this is an important problem, but I see it as a bootstrapping problem. There’s no point adding Rust to the base system unless we have people who are good at writing Rust code and who understand the language well who want to contribute. If we have such people, they are in a good position to improve upstream rustc’s FreeBSD support.

The same thing happened with Clang. It was written for OS X and ported to Linux. I fixed a bunch of small bugs early on where FreeBSD’s calling conventions were not quite Linux or not quite OS X, as did a bunch of other people who cared about FreeBSD. This became a much more exciting thing to do once there was a path to Clang replacing GCC in the base system and the Foundation funded some of the work. By the time we flipped the switch, LLVM had a FreeBSD buildbot and we had infrastructure to do ports exp runs with now clang versions.

David