Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Enji Cooper]

> On Jan 3, 2019, at 10:20, Igor Mozolevsky <igor at hybrid-lab.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> 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/I
> 
> 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!

Totally valid point. Given that I run VMware, I would like to see that fixed as well.

> 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.

I did my best to add those MK_* knobs a few years ago to speed up the build. I’m glad it’s usable..

> 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.

CompSci courses in the US (at least) has curricula which is based on Java/python.

I had a hard enough time getting people to write modern C at Facebook (the primary language was modern C++ for infra, with Java and Python being other commonly used languages). People as a whole don’t like raw 

>> 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.