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> FOSS isn't about providing other people whatever code they need for free. That's true. But FOSS is also about cooperation and Rust in particular is marketing

> FOSS isn't about providing other people whatever code they need for free. That's true. But FOSS is also about cooperation and Rust in particular is marketing themselves as open and inclusive. > If someone decides to do stuff in Rust they have every right to do so, and there's nothing their users can do except switch to something else or fork and maintain the code themselves. And what would Rust developers think if LLVM decided to make such a radical change to their codebase that Rust would no longer be able to use LLVM as a backend? Would also be in favor of an LLVM fork? > The thing that also annoys me is that the platforms that are going to lose support are either so old or so obscure I sincerely doubt there are more than a handful Gentoo installations running on those. There is also just a handful of users running Haiku, Hurd, NetBSD as compared to Linux. Yet I have not seen that argument made anywhere. The nice thing about FOSS is that also smaller voices and groups are being heard. And I think that's great. > Damn Alpha has been dead for more than 25 years, if you care about it so much you don't want to switch to a still supported architecture you should start invest real money on supporting the software stack yourself. The nice thing about these old architectures is that they often help expose bugs that remain hidden on main targets. We have fixed a lot of bugs that only became visible on architectures like SPARC and M68k.

cycloptic 6y ago
How is this Rust not being open and inclusive? Someone who has access to those old architectures can contribute support for them.
qalmakka 6y ago
> But FOSS is also about cooperation and Rust in particular is marketing themselves as open and inclusive. I dont see your point. Both Rust and LLVM are open for anyone that wants to implement and support new platforms. Espressif is submitting a new Xtensa backend for their architecture to LLVM, and the community has been using this to port Rust to the ESP32. If anyone wanted to step in and write a backend for Alpha or whatever, nobody would be there to stop them. The real issue is that people expect everything to stay the same and don't change so to avoid them any extra work. If you care so much about a dead architecture you should be aware that things may break or stop working, or that someone could stop supporting it, especially if you got everything for free. > users running Haiku, Hurd, NetBSD These platforms are run by determined people that often are ready to shoulder on themselves the task of porting stuff to their OS. I don't think they expect anyone to work and do stuff in their place. These also mostly run on platforms supported by LLVM (except netbsd, which has billions of ports), thus only requiring to adapt the OS part of the compiler (which is arguably simpler than writing an LLVM backend)

cycloptic 6y ago

How is this Rust not being open and inclusive? Someone who has access to those old architectures can contribute support for them.

qalmakka 6y ago

> But FOSS is also about cooperation and Rust in particular is marketing themselves as open and inclusive. I dont see your point. Both Rust and LLVM are open for anyone that wants to implement and support new platforms. Espressif is submitting a new Xtensa backend for their architecture to LLVM, and the community has been using this to port Rust to the ESP32. If anyone wanted to step in and write a backend for Alpha or whatever, nobody would be there to stop them. The real issue is that people expect everything to stay the same and don't change so to avoid them any extra work. If you care so much about a dead architecture you should be aware that things may break or stop working, or that someone could stop supporting it, especially if you got everything for free. > users running Haiku, Hurd, NetBSD These platforms are run by determined people that often are ready to shoulder on themselves the task of porting stuff to their OS. I don't think they expect anyone to work and do stuff in their place. These also mostly run on platforms supported by LLVM (except netbsd, which has billions of ports), thus only requiring to adapt the OS part of the compiler (which is arguably simpler than writing an LLVM backend)