Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Enji Cooper]

Igor,

> On Jan 3, 2019, at 08:32, Igor Mozolevsky <igor at hybrid-lab.co.uk> wrote:

...

> That's precisely how ideas that most people disagree with get *pushed*
> through by evangelists with confirmation bias! Like someone said
> earlier in the discussion: does Rust add anything? The answer is a
> resounding NO, save for bloat.

And this is why one reason people say “FreeBSD is dying”.

If we stuck with status quo, we wouldn’t have llvm, would use just PowerPC/Intel architectures, libxo wouldn’t be a thing, we wouldn’t have tests, etc.

Calculated risks have value. But in order to prove their acceptance and use, you need to provide prototypes to show their usefulness, provide measurements, and such.

My point is to provide an existing service that I’ve seen implemented more than once by FreeBSD-integrators in an ugly way, using non-modern C/C++, or python 2.x: the former which is more difficult to maintain than modern C/C++, and frankly was a mess; the latter which was maintainable, but slow (because JIT python) and didn’t use base system components, i.e., python 2.x.

Tl;Dr: if you don’t have anything constructive to say, please rethink your replies and provide constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is welcome. Armchair nitpicking is not.

Thanks,
-Enji