Re: It's not Rust, it's FreeBSD (and LLVM)

> On 16 Sep 2024, at 15:57, Kim Shrier <kim@westryn.net> wrote:
> I have stayed out of this conversation so far but I agree with Peter.
> I compile all my kernels and ports from source.  I make local patches
> when needed.  And while I have had some of my patshes accepted 
> into the FreeBSD source, I am not a committer.

One of the outstanding advantages of FreeBSD versus the avian alternative is 
the ports system.

There are many ports with meaningful compile time options. Typical conversation
with an avian user: “Ok, to make this work you need to tweak this compile time
option and compile” — and the answer is usually “whaaat? I don´t see that in the
repo, can’t do”.

> I have dabbled with rust, several times and I don’t like it.  It reminds
> me too much of C++ and I have never liked that language.  These
> languages appear to introduce too much complexity and their
> runtime libraries change too much over time. 

I agree with you regarding the runtime changes. The C family has many problems,
it's known since the 80’s.

But an alternative must be stable enough to be included with the base system. And recent
languages change way too much. And some changes are more aesthetic than useful, which
in my opinion doesn’t justify breaking stuff. 

Memory safety is critical, it’s been way too long with buffer overflows and
other nonsense that should not happen in a high level language, but developer sanity
is also mandatory. Languages evolve, but there’s no need to evolve them yearly.





Borja.