Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 06:23:49 -0500 From: "Garance A Drosehn" <drosih@rpi.edu> To: "Conrad Meyer" <cem@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Speculative: Rust for base system components Message-ID: <8874AED6-3CA3-4D33-AECC-534B9E3417CB@rpi.edu> In-Reply-To: <CAG6CVpWJ=AOVt7zXZKCXqJnbtJ8U_EyYTpTHOVzpoRk5JDWjyA@mail.gmail.com> References: <20190101045638.D280E1F56@spqr.komquats.com> <a2d04773-c7cc-457d-4db6-913cb84e885b@metricspace.net> <CADWvR2izXwGRwkWn52x6s3U73ki5Qdg98Y-00use=G9febhrGA@mail.gmail.com> <4ea0612bbad08e61a15d495459b2bede@rpi.edu> <CAG6CVpWJ=AOVt7zXZKCXqJnbtJ8U_EyYTpTHOVzpoRk5JDWjyA@mail.gmail.com>
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On 1 Jan 2019, at 19:35, Conrad Meyer wrote: > Hi Garance, > > On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 3:18 PM drosih <drosih@rpi.edu> wrote: >> Brian's simple experiment is a simple experiment. It's interesting, >> but hardly the definitive word in evaluating a language. > > Sure, that's fair enough. On the other hand, it matches every other > report of the compiler and language I've heard, even from advocates of > the language. Compiler performance was on the Rust roadmap for 2017 > (incremental rebuilds added during 2017) and 2018: > > https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/02/06/roadmap.html > https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/03/12/roadmap.html > > In particular I think the Rust 2018 community survey (URL below) is > informative. Scroll to the figure just above "Many non-users > responded that they did want to learn Rust, but there were factors > that slowed them down." Leading reasons for people who had used Rust > but no longer did were: (1) Rust is too intimidating, too hard to > learn, or too complicated; (3) Rust doesn't solve a problem for me; > and (6) Switching to Rust would slow me down too much. One of the top > 10 free-form comments for November 2018 is "improve compile times." > It's still a problem. > > https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/27/Rust-survey-2018.html There was a lot of good information in this message, including the parts I have deleted just to keep this message reasonably short. Thanks! So my gut reaction to this is that it seems too early for the freebsd project to make any significant commitment to rust. Some of us could get more experience with it, and then maybe we could reconsider it in a year or two. It's frustrating that these things take so much time to evaluate, but that's just the way it is. It takes a lot of work (and thus a lot of time) for a new language to catch up with all the time which has been put into compilers for established languages. I've also found some of the videos for explaining Rust to be rather intimidating, even when done by developers in the Rust community. But I do think it's trying a lot of interesting new ideas for a systems-programming language, and thus I hope to gain some more experience with it for myself. Now I just need to find some copious spare time that I can devote to that! -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosih@rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA
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