New Linux Kernel Patches Begin Plumbing Rust Support Into Bcachefs Driver

[Brane215]

Based on the part you quoted:

There are nearly 50 widget toolkits for *nix that commercial (and free) software within the industry uses. GTK, QT and SDL barely tap the surface.

Using a web browser or playing some Steam DRM Platform games means that you won't be exposed to the real issues that is blocking Wayland's uptake.

Which doesn't negate my claim. I have 1.2K packages on my Gentoo and have accidentally switched XWayland off in sway.conf and forgot to switch it back on and I didn't notice it. Even the Netbeans and SDKs based on it were working without a problem IIRC ( but with system JVM, haven't tried it with bundled one).

[Brane215]

Based on the part you quoted:

Can you name another viable standalone Wayland compositor that is in common use? After over a decade of Wayland existing.

Before Sway I used Enlightenment.

Also GNOME and other systems, based on GTK4 should be common enough.
And as I hear, KDE/QT should work with it well enough.

I can't attest to that as I haven't tried them yet. After sway, I don't really need anything else. Except maybe if someone comes up with polished sway-like bundle.

[kpedersen]

Do we know that ? [...]Not so with Rust.

If you do a search for *-sys crates on crates.io, you will see that we pretty much do know that. Rust is just a native glue between C libraries rather than an interpreted glue.

Before Sway I used Enlightenment.

Not exactly standalone but why did you switch over? Was the community too small? Too unsupported? Too niche?
The Wayland community is basically funnelled to a single offering (Sway) for a reason. That reason did not exist with the X11 ecosystem. It is a sign of Wayland not being successful and not growing correctly.

[Brane215]

De Raadt bashes Rust more.

I think the sensitive Rust fans refer to this as "toxic" because he doesn't agree with them.

1. Link to his rant on that page doesn't work for me.
2. It's FOUR YEARS OLD
3. As I can ascertain from the thread, main part is about the lack of low-level libraries that do all number-crunching work. Which has changed by now.

[Brane215]

If you do a search for *-sys crates on crates.io, you will see that we pretty much do know that. Rust is just a native glue between C libraries rather than an interpreted glue.

Fine, we all know that it can be used like that - as a glue. But low level stuff is coming fast. Open source stuff seems to follow natural market pressures - new stuff emerges once it's needed badly enough and where it is needed badly enough.

First we had just Rust+Cargo. Then some early birds came out. Now I have whole desktop suite in Rust (sway, accelerated terminal etc) and new stuff emerges weekly to monthly. I was very surprised to find LAPCE, for example. It's still very unpolished and without documentation it doesn't reallya work for me, but DAMN, that thing gives new meaning to lean&mean:

https://github.com/lapce/lapce

[Brane215]

Not exactly standalone but why did you switch over? Was the community too small? Too unsupported? Too niche?
The Wayland community is basically funnelled to a single offering (Sway) for a reason. That reason did not exist with the X11 ecosystem. It is a sign of Wayland not being successful and not growing correctly.

Once I switched to multi-monitor setup, I needed something else. Edevs had other priorities.

BTW, I don't need a special "community" for a friggin compositor. It's just a tool that should be basically invisible most of the time.
Once I found the alternative and went through (brief) pain of learning curve, I've learned that I don't need extra clutter. Sway (coming from i3 IIRC) has nailed it.
So, I don't really care if there are 5, 50 or 500 other options as long as there is one that works well enough.
I just wish it was better documented, though, perhaps with some examples and concepts of windowing systems explained, so that one would know what to tweak and where.

[kpedersen]

BTW, I don't need a special "community" for a friggin compositor.

These things are built and maintained by the community. You need it more than you think.

[pabloski]

De Raadt bashes Rust more.

I think the sensitive Rust fans refer to this as "toxic" because he doesn't agree with them.

De Raadt is mainly lamenting the absence of more middleware. Also his article is 4 years old and many many things have changed since then.

Don't get ahead of yourself. The only way to see that Rust is not the solution is to test it right? These are experiments that Microsoft will find won't end in success.

Microsoft is heavily investing in Rust, they aren't testing it. They are even replacing C# code with Rust code, meaning they have already confirmed it is viable.

you don't need to be a fortune teller to predict that Microsoft lacks the manpower to rewrite the entire Win32 API in Rust. And without doing that, those C foundations will ensure nothing will truely replace it. Even C# / .NET is winding down now.

Things aren't built in one day. Also there is no link between having C code in some places and Rust not doing well. Some people could even argue that having Rust replace C code in some places, means C is winding down!!

[Brane215]

Things aren't built in one day. Also there is no link between having C code in some places and Rust not doing well. Some people could even argue that having Rust replace C code in some places, means C is winding down!!

I agree.
Next to Rust, it seems that (especially) C and C++ have less and less reason to be used (besides legacy stuff and library support, which is changing fast), at least for anything that comes to my mind.

[marios]

Firstly I would like to thank the people who supported my claims. I am currently too busy to go through all of the responses in order to state my agreements and disagreements with every comment but I am certain that I would like to answer to some of those that I have not read.

Secondly, I would like to make clear that I have no choice on the language anyone selects. However I am free to lose interest in any project for whatever reason I see fit, speak about it as loudly as I want and try to persuade whoever I want to do the same. Everyone is free to criticise my point of view and try to persuade me otherwise. I have not read a persuasive argument yet though.

Thirdly, I have stated multiple times my strong disagreement with the inclusion of Rust in Linux. This has not changed. Since I find Linux still a pretty good kernel I will try to use it, until Rust makes it unusable for me. I have no idea what I will use then, it will definitely be a hard decision. Maybe none cares about that, but since someone might care, I feel obliged to express my point.

Finally, I am trying to give some answers to those that seem to disagree with me. I am more offensive to those that are offensive to me, or have offended me in the past.

Ok, why exactly is this a problem? Do you have a list of languages and/or compilers that you are afraid of somehow?

Yes, but rust is not in the list. But using 2 compilers for a single binary is usually a big no for me (especially if the binary is the kernel). It forces to choose between two bad choices in this case. Either use 2 different toolchains, an llvm based for Rust and another of my choice for C (does not like the best idea and might break things, i.e. LTO) or use an llvm toolchain compatible with rustc for both C and Rust which is too restrictive (even the latest llvm might be incompatible with rustc, let alone gcc).

Replacing C with Rust was always the plan for BcacheFS.

I found it out when I read this article. That's why I ditched my plans to use BcacheFS before they fulfill their plan.

It really don't effect him in a negative way. His complaint is that may effect his ability to use it on an ARM SBC in the future which is won't.

I have no guarantees that it won't. On the contrary I have strong evidence that it will...

Concern trolling at its finest

Well, I was hoping that you would stop quoting my posts, so I could ignore your pitiful existence. No i am not trolling, bcachefs could have matched my use case. But since it is not future proof any more (rustc will be a hard dependency anytime now and then I will have to drop it and migrate everything in another fs), I cannot use it.