FreeBSD Considers Making Use Of Rust Within Its Base System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Considers Making Use Of Rust Within Its Base System

FreeBSD developers are currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the FreeBSD base system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Considers-Rust-Base

[varikonniemi]

if this does not inflame most rust haters i don't know what would.

[dlq84]

if this does not inflame most rust haters i don't know what would.

Any day now Rust will die off, they said so

[timofonic]

Maybe they believe this will make dying BSD userbase more popular, as Rust is expanding at pandemic levels. Soon watches and Apple devices will be programmed in Rust too.

[roviq]

Maybe they believe this will make dying BSD userbase more popular, as Rust is expanding at pandemic levels. Soon watches and Apple devices will be programmed in Rust too.

Just today I read about this: Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

I think Rust is healthy enough and gaining a lot of traction, but it seems many people have left the project and pursuing other interests now that the pandemic hobbies have been left by many (I know I stopped many of mine!).

[User29]

I usually say, who cares about build time compared to the benefits. But in case of FBSD where people tend to build their own infra (just like in gentoo) this can be a PITA for certain people.

[darkoverlordofdata]

"they could (re)write various components into this programming language such as the ZFS daemon (zfsd)"

So, is there something wrong with the current zfs daemon that can only be fixed by re-writing in rust? Or are we just itching to use the new toys?

[laffer1]

"they could (re)write various components into this programming language such as the ZFS daemon (zfsd)"

So, is there something wrong with the current zfs daemon that can only be fixed by re-writing in rust? Or are we just itching to use the new toys?

Not really. Many FreeBSD devs dislike C++ and rust has some security benefits. It might also get some folks involved that don't want to use C and modernize things a bit in some areas.

It probably makes more sense to use for their package manager (pkg). I've been considering using either rust or C++ with the MidnightBSD package manager lately also. It's clunky in C for certain tasks.

[schmidtbag]

if this does not inflame most rust haters i don't know what would.

I don't know of anyone who hates Rust, but there seem to be plenty of people who (understandably) hate Rust zealots.

[andyprough]

Dimitry Andric wrote a compelling argument for letting new toolchain components for base live in ports -

why keep attempting to build all these huge toolchain components in our base system at all? Our bmake is reasonably powerful, but upstream build systems for both LLVM and Rust require lots of dependencies that we can never all import. And mimicking those upstream builds in our base system is getting more and more complicated all the time