Rust For Linux Kernel Patches Revised With Upgraded Rust Toolchain, Build Improvements

[wswartzendruber]

Languages like Rust and Python are unstable moving targets that will never be suitable for critical platforms or programs.

I mean seriously, just reading this article with the Rust developer calmly explaining that it was "simply" a matter of Rust being unstable, but this one part would be stable soon, made my head spin so hard I lost touch with reality for a few milliseconds.

My goodness, these fly-by-night languages don't even pretend to care about stability or backwards compatibility. They just come out with a version, realize there could be improvements, then chuck that version out the window and create a new, completely incompatible, one.

That's the opposite of progress.

It's chaos.

Any part of the Rust standard library is going to have one of three states:

1. Unstable
2. Stable
3. Deprecated

Unstable APIs are present, but are subject to change. Stable APIs are committed to being in the standard library permanently. Depcrecated APIs used to be stable, are still present, but have been marked as obsolete.

Every API that has been declared stable will never be removed outright. They may be deprecated, but never removed.

[zxy_thf]

shhhhh, Linux kernel API is also a moving target, esp. for 3rd party drivers.
Don't tell those "serious mission critical" people this secret.

[direc85]

Python has been around since 1991 is 30 years long enough for you?

I stand corrected! I had the assumption it's one of the newer languages, but now that I think about it, I have never heard of Python 1...

[ssokolow]

I stand corrected! I had the assumption it's one of the newer languages, but now that I think about it, I have never heard of Python 1...

I started with Python 2.3 back in the early 2000s and there were still bits of code requiring Python 1.5.2 floating around at the time.

[lectrode]

typo:

just over one month layer

[jacob]

Looking forward to this. Rust currently is the best in class programming language, although Zig seems interessting aswell. The borrow checker is such a game changer. Since I started developing in Rust, I rarely have to use a debugger or google weird compiler messages and it helps writing better cpp code too.

I think Zig and Rust are very different beasts targeted at totally different problem domains.

[jacob]

Has Rust even declared itself stable yet?

Yes. It's currently at its 3rd stable edition (2021).

[bug77]

Python and Rust are both quite new languages, relatively speaking, and hence developing quite rapidly. New features are being pumped into C++ all the time, and still it's considered stable.

So what exatly makes a language unstable?

Has Rust even declared itself stable yet?

Compared to its early days, it's very, very stable at the moment. Additions to the language itself are focused things. Standard libraries are also pretty stable as a consequence. And a lot of works goes into the compiler and cargo. Hell, some things were fixed in LLVM because of Rust.

In fact, the last major addition to the language, afair, is async/await, two years ago.

[mdedetrich]

Languages like Rust and Python are unstable moving targets that will never be suitable for critical platforms or programs.

I mean seriously, just reading this article with the Rust developer calmly explaining that it was "simply" a matter of Rust being unstable, but this one part would be stable soon, made my head spin so hard I lost touch with reality for a few milliseconds.

My goodness, these fly-by-night languages don't even pretend to care about stability or backwards compatibility. They just come out with a version, realize there could be improvements, then chuck that version out the window and create a new, completely incompatible, one.

That's the opposite of progress.

It's chaos.

Have you actually heard of backwards compatibility?

[ferry]

Some ministries of the Dutch government are using Python, even the Ministry of Justice and Security. Or is a government not “critical” enough for you?

I live in the Netherlands. I wouldn't say that that ministry is well known for their good decision making. But they are probably on python2.7 then as 3.x broke everything.