Rusticl Posted For Working On OpenCL 3.0 Within Rust For Mesa Gallium3D Drivers

[Luke_Wolf]

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not some suckless lunatic who purges any language they don't like from their system, and of course I have many Rust applications running here (written from my firefox).
I just don't think Rust is mature enough yet for critical components, mainly due to the instability of the rustc toolchain and the lack of a stable ABI & standard.

Then you're either a liar or ignorant.

There's only two languages that have actual standards associated with them: C and C++.

Javascript - The standard may exist but everyone knows the truth is that everyone uses V8Script with Mozilla being the last holdout, which causes problems with webpages in Firefox

C# - Standard exists and mono technically exists but is effectively deprecated and all of the interest in .NET is being invested in .NET Core

Java - I would say that Oracle made its stance that Java is not a standard very clear in its lawsuit against Google.

Python - Has multiple implementations but it's less of a standard than Javascript

SQL - The core basic SQL language is a standard but outside of basic stuff SQL is generally not portable between DBs

and guess what... that's all of the big languages that a normal developer is going to use.

Given the state of C and C++ vs other languages can we say that obsessing over language standards with multiple implementations really improves things vs a foundation or vendor driving a single implementation? I think not. Competition is a good thing but formal standards do not make a good language or software, or even a competitive environment which would make it an actual standard.

[karolherbst]

Then you're either a liar or ignorant.

There's only two languages that have actual standards associated with them: C and C++.

Javascript - The standard may exist but everyone knows the truth is that everyone uses V8Script with Mozilla being the last holdout, which causes problems with webpages in Firefox

C# - Standard exists and mono technically exists but is effectively deprecated and all of the interest in .NET is being invested in .NET Core

Java - I would say that Oracle made its stance that Java is not a standard very clear in its lawsuit against Google.

Python - Has multiple implementations but it's less of a standard than Javascript

SQL - The core basic SQL language is a standard but outside of basic stuff SQL is generally not portable between DBs

and guess what... that's all of the big languages that a normal developer is going to use.

Given the state of C and C++ vs other languages can we say that obsessing over language standards with multiple implementations really improves things vs a foundation or vendor driving a single implementation? I think not. Competition is a good thing but formal standards do not make a good language or software, or even a competitive environment which would make it an actual standard.

Add perl which is used by git...

[karolherbst]

uhh another one: assembly, which is used by the kernel and a lot of other components still. Although you can call assembly hardly a programming language.

[Luke_Wolf]

uhh another one: assembly, which is used by the kernel and a lot of other components still. Although you can call assembly hardly a programming language.

I mean I could point out that the Linux kernel among other critical infrastructure doesn't even use C it uses GNU-C which is an implementation specific variant of C but I figured that was labouring the point :P

[MadeUpName]

openCL on Linux long ago devolved into a cruel, cruel l joke.

[smitty3268]

Could we please wait with getting unstandardized, unstable languages into critical system components until said language matures and becomes standardized?

I find it hard to count OpenCL as a critical system component given the current state of OpenCL on linux. If it's really critical, you're not really using Linux, or at least not Mesa, anyway.

[Developer12]

It's not a personal project, it leverages existing mesa code and is intended as a mesa component.

I have no issue with people using Rust in their personal projects, but it's simply too immature for critical components like the system OpenGL (& friends) driver at this point.

The core language is stabilized. There are many unstable features still in the works, as is the case for many languages that aren't 40+ years old (and many that are!), but much of Rust has already been set in stone.

If you don't like it, use clover. Hopefully you don't like this enough to stay on clover if this rust implementation handily outmatches it.

The only time "unstable" things get declared stable is truly when they're used for large and important projects, not the other way around. Otherwise people like yourself will wine on and on about it being unproven until the end of time.

[jacob]

Could we please wait with getting unstandardized, unstable languages into critical system components until said language matures and becomes standardized?

"Standardised" is not some holy grail or guarantee of quality. In fact, in reality the official standards result from compromises by committee, where politics and private interests often trump any technical rationale (CORBA was a textbook example of this).

Rust doesn't need to be standardised. Standardisation, with all its caveats, USED to matter when compilers were proprietary and closed. With Rust being entirely FOSS there is no risk that it would one day vanish or try to enforce vendor lock-in, so there is no need for alternative implementations that we could move to if that happened.

I don't know what makes you think Rust is "unstable", it follows a three-yearly stable editions model... just like C++.

[jacob]

Then you're either a liar or ignorant.

There's only two languages that have actual standards associated with them: C and C++.

Javascript - The standard may exist but everyone knows the truth is that everyone uses V8Script with Mozilla being the last holdout, which causes problems with webpages in Firefox

C# - Standard exists and mono technically exists but is effectively deprecated and all of the interest in .NET is being invested in .NET Core

Java - I would say that Oracle made its stance that Java is not a standard very clear in its lawsuit against Google.

Python - Has multiple implementations but it's less of a standard than Javascript

SQL - The core basic SQL language is a standard but outside of basic stuff SQL is generally not portable between DBs

and guess what... that's all of the big languages that a normal developer is going to use.

Given the state of C and C++ vs other languages can we say that obsessing over language standards with multiple implementations really improves things vs a foundation or vendor driving a single implementation? I think not. Competition is a good thing but formal standards do not make a good language or software, or even a competitive environment which would make it an actual standard.

Ada and Pascal also have an official standardS though. Even BASIC (I believe there is an ANSI BASIC)

[R41N3R]

It's great to see progress of OpenCL in Mesa. It would be interesting to know if Rust provided the expected advantages. Overall I'm greatful that there is a new approach now to get OpenCL covered by Mesa with rusticl!