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This is a strawman argument. To be reminded of what it takes to truly "bootstrap" a C compiler, I recommend everyone to read Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture

• zelly 6y ago
  gcc can still be bootstraped from just an assembler and linker[1] with very few binaries you have to trust and it is possible on comoddity hardware. Bootstrapping Rust is so difficult that adding it to Linux would for all purposes eliminate this feature (being able to be built completely from source) from Linux, probably leading to a fork of Linux without Rust for those that care about it. [1] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Reduced-Binary-Seed-Bootstrap.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Reduced-Binary-Seed...
  • steveklabnik 6y ago
    mrustc can shorten that bootstrap, and also, many Linux distros already ship a rustc that they’ve bootstrapped as far back as they thought prudent. So yes, I can see some folks doing something like this, but I doubt that the major distros would.