The Case for Rust (in the base system)

[T-Aoki]

And the upstream will change almost daily, just like NPM, CPAN, PIP does. Crates.io is just another clone of these

Yes. This is one of the reason I'm staying neutral (not welcoming, but not "fully" denying with regard to "memory-safe" aspect).
"Moving goals" do not fit for base. So even if Rust (or any other candidates for "memory"-safe languages) itself is well standardized in the future, crates (and any kind alike) used in official userland and/or kernel should be developed and maintained by FreeBSD project (and/or its variants like HardenedBSD).

 

[kpedersen]

Yes. This is one of the reason I'm staying neutral (not welcoming, but not "fully" denying with regard to "memory-safe" aspect).

That's a good position to maintain.

I know I often talk negatively about Rust here, but if they can just sort out their dependency / bindings issue, the language is *so* close to being a game changer. That is probably why I give it such a hard time.

 

[T-Aoki]

I think Rust should've been built as a C frontend. If so, talented and experienced C developers (unlike me) in FreeBSD project and any other projects would be understand what's still-in-C side of codes do to obtain best results from Rust via code reviews.

This kind of process was, IIRC, often done when asm was most frequently used, to see the asm outputs of the compilers are fine or problematic.

I (recently) consider C as kinda structured assembler or good intermediate language (even though, some codes are still needed to be in asm, sometime for optimization, sometimes for defining specific memory layouts and/or special (unusual-in-C) sections, and/or specifying quite specific MMU configurations.

So for Rust-specific sections would be needed to be asm in those cases.

 

[kpedersen]

I think Rust should've been built as a C frontend.

I exactly agree. It would allow Rust to benefit from direct interop with C libraries (probably the core reason why C++ has remained so popular). Of course we all want safety but there is no way we can give up clean access to C when the entire computing platform *is* C (for better or for worse).