Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On Tue, 1 Jan 2019 at 02:46, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
> On 2019-Jan-01 00:53:48 +0000, Igor Mozolevsky <igor at hybrid-lab.co.uk> wrote:
> >Quite frankly the compile time isn't really *that* important,
>
> I disagree.  FreeBSD seems to be heading back to the batch days - you
> submit your buildworld request and come back tomorrow to see if it worked.

<snip>

In my book, that makes the submitter think about what they write, and
not mindlessly write code hoping it would automagically compile.
Throwing some code at a compiler to "see if it worked" is the
equivalent of a builder throwing some bricks together to see if they
would hold up as a house... I hope you'd expect far better from the
people who build the place where you live, right, so why do not apply
a similarly rigorous process to coding? What you're blaming is the
messy architecture and the unnecessary re-parsing of the same files
over and over, but that's a different problem to a slow code
generation _after_ the source had been parsed, AFAIK any compiler's
bottleneck is lexing and parsing [1].

1. Joel on Software p13, AJ Spolsky, Apress, NYC (too late at night to
do a proper reference)

-- 
Igor M.