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Especially when you have top voted sibling comments saying "Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the la

Especially when you have top voted sibling comments saying "Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level." What?! The year of the Linux desktop hasn't been eluding us because of buffer overflows and memory safety. The Rust hype train is incredible. The Linux desktop problems have nothing to do with the goal Rust sets out to solve. It's definitely a good choice of language for the problem, don't get me wrong, but choosing that language doesn't improve the chances of COSMIC revolutionising the Linux desktop situation one iota.

southerntofu 5y ago
I don't know about revolutionizing the Linux desktop, but i can assure you rust made me a better programmer (even when i write C or python) despite being a very bad programmer to start with. I also know that Linux desktops are often victims of memory bugs, and that a higher-level language for extensions is something people appreciate, that's why there's JS in GNOME.
mmstick76 5y ago
Actually, a lot of the early Linux desktop was hampered by this exact problem. I remember in the late 2000s experiencing segfaults constantly in a lot of applications, Mesa/X11, the kernel, and even the desktop environment itself. You had to spend a lot of time tracking down a setup that works and sticking to it when you find it. It's gotten remarkably better since then, but GNOME Shell is still really fragile with segfaults when developing extensions for it. That said, this is not the sole benefit of Rust. It is more of a side effect of aliasing XOR mutability than the primary benefit of Rust as a whole. Let's take a look at the C and Vala landscape as a comparison. Neither support message passing with channels, and async support is virtually an unmaintainable hack. Vala has generics thankfully, but C doesn't have generics and it's really bad. It also doesn't help that your only options for building software is pretty much almost entirely GLib and whatever sparse set libraries might be available for the package manager. Whereas with Rust there's a vast immutable repository of libraries you can leverage, and publishing open source libraries on the platform is easy.

southerntofu 5y ago

I don't know about revolutionizing the Linux desktop, but i can assure you rust made me a better programmer (even when i write C or python) despite being a very bad programmer to start with. I also know that Linux desktops are often victims of memory bugs, and that a higher-level language for extensions is something people appreciate, that's why there's JS in GNOME.

mmstick76 5y ago

Actually, a lot of the early Linux desktop was hampered by this exact problem. I remember in the late 2000s experiencing segfaults constantly in a lot of applications, Mesa/X11, the kernel, and even the desktop environment itself. You had to spend a lot of time tracking down a setup that works and sticking to it when you find it. It's gotten remarkably better since then, but GNOME Shell is still really fragile with segfaults when developing extensions for it. That said, this is not the sole benefit of Rust. It is more of a side effect of aliasing XOR mutability than the primary benefit of Rust as a whole. Let's take a look at the C and Vala landscape as a comparison. Neither support message passing with channels, and async support is virtually an unmaintainable hack. Vala has generics thankfully, but C doesn't have generics and it's really bad. It also doesn't help that your only options for building software is pretty much almost entirely GLib and whatever sparse set libraries might be available for the package manager. Whereas with Rust there's a vast immutable repository of libraries you can leverage, and publishing open source libraries on the platform is easy.