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Redox OS - an OS built entirely out of Rust
(www.redox-os.org)
I don't understand the obsession with rust.
From my personal experience I can tell you 2 reasons. The first is that this is the first general purpose language that can be used for all projects. You can use it on the web browser with web assembly, it is good for backend and it also is low level enough to use it for OS development and embedded. Other languages are good only for some thing and really bad for others. The second reason is that it is designed around catching errors at compile time. The error handling and strict typing forces the developer to handle errors. I have to spend more time creating the program but considerably less time finding and fixing bugs.
That sounds pretty great. I get sick of having to switch gears for every layer. As a hobbyist it is tough to remember five or six languages well enough when only coding something a few times a year.
Since I do embedded, scripting, web front and back end this is sure tempting.
I have been hesitant to try to learn yet another language (this would make...ummm.. idk I lost count ages ago). But with all the hype I may break down and give it a whirl.
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I know the evangelists can be somewhat overwhelming, but its popularity is not unwarranted. It's fairly easy to pick up, has an incredibly enthusiastic and welcoming community. People like it because it's incredibly performant, and its memory safe. In terms of DX it's really a joy to work with. It just has a LOT going for it, and the main drawback you'll hear about (difficulty) is really overblown and most devs can pick it up in a matter of months.
The main difficulty I have with Rust (what prevents me from using it), is that the maintainers insist on statically compiling everything. This is fine for small programs, and even large monolithic applications that are not expected to change very often.
But for the machine learning projects I work on, I might want to include a single algorithm from a fairly large library of algorithms. The amount of memory used is not trivial, I am talking about the difference between loading a single algorithm in 50 MB of compiled code for a dynamically loadable library, versus loading the entire 1.5 GB library of algorithms of statically linked code just to use that one algorithm. Then when distributing this code to a few dozen compute nodes, that 50 MB versus 1.5 GB is suddenly a very noticeable difference.
There are other problems with statically linking everything as well, for example, if you want your application to be written in a high-level language like Python, TypeScript, or Lisp, you might want to have a library of Rust code that you can dynamically load into the Python interpreter and establish foreign function bindings to the Rust APIs. But this is not possible with statically linked code.
And as I understand, it is a difficult technical problem to solve. Apparently, in order for Rust to optimize a program and guarantee type safety and performance, it needs the type information in the source code. This type information is not normally stored into the dynamically loadable libraries (the .so or .dll files), so if you dynamically load a library into a Rust program its type safety and performance guarantees go out the window. So the Rust compiler developers have chosen to make everything as statically compiled as possible.
This is why I don't see Rust replacing C any time soon. A language like Zig might have a better chance than Rust because it can produce dynamically loadable libraries that are fully ABI compatible with the libraries compiled by C compilers.
You can load Rust into Python just fine. In fact, several packages have started requiring a Rust compiler on platforms thst don't get prebuilt binaries. It's why I installed Rust on my phone.
The build files for Rust are bigger than you may expect, but they're not unreasonably big. Languages like Python and Java like to put their dependencies in system folders and cache folders outside of their project so you don't notice them as often, but I find the difference not that problematic. The binaries Rust generates are often huge but if you build in release mode rather than debug mode and strip the debug symbols, you can quickly remove hundreds of megabytes of "executable" data.
Rust can be told to export things in the C FFI, which is how Python bindings are generally accomplished (although you rarely deal with those because of all the helper crates).
Statically compiled code will also load into processes fine, they just take up more RAM than you may like. The OS normally deduplicates dynamically loaded libraries across running processes, but with statically compiled programs you only get the one blob (which itself then gets deduplicated, usually).
Rust can also load and access standard DLLs. The safety assertions do break, because these files are accessed through the C FFI which is marked unsafe automatically, but that doesn't need to be a problem.
There are downsides and upsides to static compilation, but it doesn't really affect glue languages like Python or Typescript. Early versions of Rust lacked the C FFI and there are still issues with Rust programs dynamically loading other Rust programs without going through the C FFI, but I don't think that's a common issue at all.
I don't see Rust replace all of C either, because I think Rust is a better replacement for C++ than for C. The C parts it does replace (parsers, drivers, GUIs, complex command line tools) weren't really things I would write in C in the first place. There are still cars where Rust just fails (it can't deal with running out of memory, for one) so languages like Zig will always have their place.
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And the fucking MIT License
Yes, as much as I appreciate memory safety and rust in particular. I'm very worried by this pivot away from copyleft and GPL. Specially the rewriting in rust phenomenon of fundamental stuff. It's safer, yes, but they're all pretty much non GPL and it seems very risky to me. Make no mistake, the industry is riding this wave to move away from copyleft to permissive licenses.
I wish that people understood the importance of FSF and GNU
Well that is rather insidious. Crap. They probably understand the reasons for the GPL very well. Doesn't mean they support them.
I'm sure there's some community pull as well, because most of the rust ecosystem seems to be converged on MIT. But what despairs me is the wilful sidelining of GPL and everything GNU by some open source community members/corporate people. So yeah, you're probably right
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It’s a system programming language that isn’t C or C++.
Edit to add: How did Go get on that page? That’s a stretch.
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The idea is less bugs due to stricter rules when developing and compiling. You can understand that.
Then, also more access to build tools and high level programming without changing languages.
If you have no need for that, then just know others do and it's a great thing.
Now imagine the new COSMIC desktop environment in Rust on Redox, that would be great
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I’ve used it in a VM just to mess around. I’d like to install it on an old ThinkPad and try to compile some applications.
How long would it take to compile their Rust microkernel alone compared to a similar one done in C? There are many posts around the web complaining about Rust's long compile times, though thankfully rarely as slow as C++
I wouldn't say it's inappropriate as there is more and more rust making it into the native kernel. I'll definitely throw this on my Ventoy usb and see if I can get it to boot
Oh my god they rewrote Linux in Rust. Amazing.
Having some hardware mentioned on the site that is supported and ready for use could be helpful if someone wants to try it (say raspberry pi), There are probably people who are worried to will make their computer explode.
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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