Google Making $1M USD Investment To Improve Rust & C++ Interoperability

[dkasak]

$1m. I know how big bureaucracies work. That will be:

• 3 dudes doing around 6 months of part-time work each, when they're not on other projects ( ha! ), and
• a few layers of management above them to ensure the $1m is being spent well

[alphabitserial]

C++ and Rust interoperability is already possible, facilitating gradual rewrites. Fish shell has ported from C++ to Rust that way already. There are projects that make this easier, for example cxx. Firefox is a great example of an existing, longstanding C++ project which has integrated Rust components like wgpu to power their WebGPU support and stylo for CSS. Firefox has required Rust support on all platforms since 2017.

It's always good to make the interoperability story easier to get started with, safer, and more ergonomic though. Looking forward to seeing the situation improve more down the line.

[mathletic]

$1m. I know how big bureaucracies work. That will be:

• 3 dudes doing around 6 months of part-time work each, when they're not on other projects ( ha! ), and
• a few layers of management above them to ensure the $1m is being spent well

The money will not spent by Google, but by the Rust foundation. This should be way more lean!

[Brane215]

C++

Being close to a super-set of C helped but... well that's kind of the point of evolution rather than whatever Rust is doing.

Much of Windows i.e 3.1 relied on it before it was even properly standardized (C++98).

C++ had WAY less of a competition. What else was there out of academic projects, besides perhaps Pascal ?
And its big feature was that it was basically C-compatible.

Since Rust was meant to be rethought from scratch, it doesn't have that option.

[Daktyl198]

The links here mention its currently not enabled. It builds without Rust.

You really suck at googling. That article is from 2019. Starting in 2020 Microsoft started replacing libraries in Windows with versions written in rust. Starting in 2023, Microsoft started shipping Rust code in the kernel itself, starting with certain syscall implementations. Your information is a little lacking.

[kpedersen]

You really suck at googling. That article is from 2019

Follow it through, you will see it leads to the same BlueHat IL presentations.

Starting in 2023, Microsoft started shipping Rust code in the kernel itself, starting with certain syscall implementations.

Citation needed. Particularly the part where this syscall is critical and doesn't have an easy C fallback.

Also, I am still waiting for you to let me know which additional user accounts you suspect of being mine?

C++ had WAY less of a competition. What else was there out of academic projects, besides perhaps Pascal ?.

Indeed. Everything is harder these days. But that doesn't really change anything. C++ still is the majority and Rust is still lacking uptake. The world would have been better if the fundamental language underpinning everything was safer than ANSI C but unfortunately that is not the case.

The problem is that Rust people tend to just want to talk and argue as to how great they think Rust is for their narrow use-case rather than take a more realistic approach to fixing the issues in the language (dependencies, interop, standards, vendors) and actually facilitating uptake.

For example my suggestion of a inline C compiler was met with some twit whining about multiple accounts and strange fantasies about posting activities. A classic Rust kid.

Not a small feat for a big project that never considered even C++, let alone something completely different.

Dragging in more languages is always considered. Including C++. But unlike Apple's use of C++ in the macOS kernel; the Rust or C++ that gets in Linux is fairly disconnected and tends to remain a minor part outside of C.

[johanb]

Easy: riscv64-linux-android. Is a Tier 3 Rust platform. The emulators are are available without Rust though. "Critical".


That's not an excuse for Rust to be unportable though.


The links here mention its currently not enabled. It builds without Rust. Likely it will remain that way and they will give some vague excuse why. You'll see. Too much legacy to bind against.

... is that it? After a decade, that is *all* the progress Rust has made. Not impressive.

Well, tier 3 still builds and often works fine too. I'm currently using Rust at work with mips32 which recently got demoted to tier 3 too, but still works fine with the nightly releases of Rust. You have to add a flag to force it to built the stdlib locally, but then it works as usual. It got demoted to tier 3 because there way a blinking test and no one was ready to be open to fixing and maintaining the mips32 support, but it still works perfectly for me. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something similar with riscv64-linux-android, that it works fine but there's no maintainer for it.

[spicfoo]

Easy: riscv64-linux-android. Is a Tier 3 Rust platform

Lol. I asked for a relevant architecture for Android that is unsupported and you point to an obscure one that is supported.

The links here mention its currently not enabled

Try reading something more current than 2019 dude. How about https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/..._windows_rust/. Are you going to continue pretending that Google and Microsoft are wrong when they say Android and Windows depends on Rust?

[kpedersen]

Well, tier 3 still builds and often works fine too. I'm currently using Rust at work with mips32 which recently got demoted to tier 3 too

It looks like they are struggling to maintain this stuff in general. Didn't MIPS (little endian) for Android get supported not *too* long ago. And now its potentially rotting again?

I wouldn't be surprised if there was something similar with riscv64-linux-android, that it works fine but there's no maintainer for it.

Yep, the Rust community is much more tiny than the noise people emit on the internet. It is struggling with maintaining things like this.
At the moment, it can work but only if the hardware provide very specific extensions (listed on that page with the earlier link).

[spicfoo]

I can't speak for Android, but I think we need some actual citations on the Windows portion of your statement. The last I heard is that they are looking at replacing much of their .NET infrastructure with Rust code, but I don't remember saying Rust was a critical component of the Windows build environment.

Citations are readily available from dozens of sources.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/27/microsoft_windows_rust/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE&t=1s

Go ahead and read them. Windows depends on Rust now and so does Android. Linus has confirmed he is fine with adopting Rust into Linux core as well, so I expect that to happen within the next couple of years. Apple is aggressively hiring Rust engineers and so does Google and Amazon. I can't think of a single major tech player or platform that isn't doing the same thing.