Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2019 at 17:41, Enji Cooper wrote:
>
> Igor,
>
> > On Jan 3, 2019, at 08:32, Igor Mozolevsky 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.

Really, FreeBSD is dying because people don't want to experiment with
"new toys" that have *not* been proven to be effective at what they
claim to do while having been proven to be a bloat? Really, that's
your argument? Well, like And there I was thinking it way dying
because of long-term "issues" like this one:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203874 that prevent
me (and I suspect many many others) from virtualising FreeBSD and
causing a switch to the various flavours of Linux!

Like Wojciech said, absolutely nothing prevents you from forking off a
branch and even re-writing the entire code in Rust, just don't turn
around and say "I spend X amount of time on it therefore it must be
integrated into FreeBSD-proper regardless of the numerous shortfalls"!
As it stands the base install is too large as it is, and I have
recompile the whole thing with a whole bunch of WITHOUTs already, and
you're saying more bloatware should be added.



> 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.

Maintainability is not about code, it's about people's skills and
documentation, if one is inept at C, or Python, what on Earth makes
you think they would write amazing code in Rust? Your argument simply
doesn't follow there at all.


> 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.

Here's my constructive criticism: don't waste resources on an unproven
and still-evolving language; if you have *that* much free time on your hands
start working through BugZilla.


--
Igor M.