2017-03-28 23:59 GMT+02:00 <narvu...@tutanota.com>: > Hello, > > I just want to know the opinion of OpenBSD developpers about Rust and Go, > I already know Ted's opinion. > http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/thoughts-on-replacement-languages > > As they are both touted as memory safe, what do you think about them ? >
As a non-obsd dev but fan of running non-mainstream platforms, things like this feels like a guarantee that those languages don't really hit off on anything that isn't arm64 or amd64 (or i386): From: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=148688088905106&w=2 >Rust devs have deprecated the current configure + make way to build >(Makefile are deleted in trunk, the forecoming 1.17.0 version) to switch >to rustbuild system: a custom orchestor for building rustc. And as >reinventing the wheel isn't enough, the tool is written in Rust language >and requires Cargo to build. >It makes the lang/rust port to requires a *two* binaries bootstrap (one >for rustc and another for cargo). All of this kind of crap is just hidden from people if all your environments are linuxbuntu on amd/arm64 where someone else worked for months to make a binary package for you. But if you are not on that cpu, and not on that OS and don't have someone else to make the work for you, all those fancy-pants "we bootstrap java with java because we love java" tricks really do hurt portability. And at least for some of us, being a slight step away from the middle ground is part of why we run openbsd. Also, this is before even starting to write stuff using all the features they promise for you. I went and learnt how to code Erlang from a few of the erlang books out there and they were nice enough to promise that erlang could spawn super cheap fast subprocesses without using OS threads which felt really nice, since obsd didn't have anything else than pthreads at the time. But between the publishing of those books and the runtimes commonly used for erlang, they had just folded and went with OS threads anyhow so it would not MP well on obsd still. Later on, as the threading improved on obsd, it became well and usable, but it made me a bit wary of languages promising a lot of things, which may or may not be true on my fav OS. Also, as others have pointed out on HN and elsewhere, when many answers to Rust questions are "You have to use nightly for that", then it's just not mature enough yet. The "Curl is C" discussion showed a lot of those things, there is Rust code less than 2 years old that will not work on the latest release due to changes in the language itself. -- May the most significant bit of your life be positive.
