Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Cy Schubert]

What would having another language in base buy us? This reminds me of a couple of months ago at OpenHack Victoria someone was trying to convince me that the kernel needed a JavaVM. (Sure we each had a few beers) but the similarity of this discussion doesn't escape me. Kernel modules and functions written in java^H^H^H^H rust: why?

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Sent using a tiny phone keyboard.
Apologies for any typos and autocorrect.
Also, this old phone only supports top post. Apologies.

Cy Schubert
<Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> or <cy at freebsd.org>
The need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Jeremy
Sent: 31/12/2018 18:48
To: Igor Mozolevsky
Cc: Hackers freeBSD
Subject: Re: Speculative: Rust for base system components

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.
That is a significant hinderance to development and, based on various
mailing list comments, is causing breakage because developers are cutting
corners due to the pain involved in running "make universe" before they
make a large change.

>longer (if not much longer) build times might push toward a better
>modularisation and compartmentalisation of the OS and the kernel so a
>small change in the kernel, for example, doesn't require the
>recompilation of the whole damn thing when nothing else is affected.

Two problems here:
1) make doesn't seem to be sufficient to correctly describe a dependency
tree to allow incremental/partial builds (at, everyone I'm aware of who
has a successful incremental build system has started by migrating off
make).  This means that a significant part of the work will be re-writing
the FreeBSD build system into something else like (eg) Bazel.
2) The bottleneck very quickly turns into the linker.

-- 
Peter Jeremy