Experimenting Is Underway For Rust Code Within Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Experimenting Is Underway For Rust Code Within Mesa

Longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst who has worked extensively on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as well as the OpenCL/compute stack while being employed by Red Hat is now toying with the idea of Rust code inside Mesa...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Rust-2021-Experiment

[bachchain]

It'll be interesting to see people who've never written a single commit to mesa try and explain why Karol is an idiot that doesn't know what he's doing

[jbranso]

I'm starting to wonder if Zig is a better C alternative? Sorry to start the resulting flame-war....

[kpedersen]

It'll be interesting to see people who've never written a single commit to mesa try and explain why Karol is an idiot that doesn't know what he's doing

Granted that I have never passed one bill but I still know Boris Johnson is incompetent.
Likewise I have never really bought anything Microsoft but I know they are pretty sucky as a company.

I absolutely "reserve judgement" on Karol but no developer is infallible in their decisions. This is what peer review is for. All I know is that Rust currently is problematic for many architectures.

Besides, Karol is investigating Rust's usage. Nothing wrong with that, they are approaching it well. It makes me cringe to see people flood to young languages without this stage!

[mdedetrich]

Now lets waste another 20 pages of Phoronix armchair "experts" making a massive s**tstorm out of Rust's non issues even though they clearly have no real experience in the language.

Oh and Karol, just like Linus have no idea what they are talking about. <- This is sarcasm

I'm starting to wonder if Zig is a better C alternative? Sorry to start the resulting flame-war....

Rust is much more mature and has much wider usage than Zig.

Ontop of this, Zig doesn't have as many guarantees that Rust's borrow checker can prove and picking another another language to use is a very expensive decision and taking this into account Rust brings the most value on the table.

Unfortunately making a new programming language successful is brutal, you need to hit a niche that hasn't been served and you need to hit it really hard. Rust has managed to do this, its core design tenets is to have the same low level zero cost abstraction as C/C++ but use a type system to prove as much as possible about memory safety at compile time. Languages like D or Zig which claim to be a better C++ or better C respectively just don't bring enough to the table to cut it for most cases.

[brad0]

Keep it optional and to the side. Last thing necessary is more un-portable crap added in.

[karolherbst]

Keep it optional and to the side. Last thing necessary is more un-portable crap added in.

this is actually a problem, as meson doesn't allow you to require Rust support optionally. So... don't really want to submit the code unless that's possible

[oleid]

I absolutely "reserve judgement" on Karol but no developer is infallible in their decisions. This is what peer review is for. All I know is that Rust currently is problematic for many architectures.

Do those have 3D drivers?
Jokes aside, rust's still experimental gcc backend now lives under rust-lang organization. This means, mainlining can continue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/ppf83d/gcc_codegen_now_under_rustlang_organization/

[oleid]

his is actually a problem, as meson doesn't allow you to require Rust support optionally.

Meson bug?

[karolherbst]

Meson bug?

Yeah, I guess so. I was actually wondering about digging into mesons code to help out with the Rust support a little. But this is more of a general meson issue, as you have to list your languages inside the "project" declaration, but you can't do anything before that :/ Maybe meson already supports it and I just missed how.