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If you look at the market shares, you’ll quickly realize that this would mean abandoning all the BSDs, Haiku, Hurd, all the obscure Linux distributions and so o

If you look at the market shares, you’ll quickly realize that this would mean abandoning all the BSDs, Haiku, Hurd, all the obscure Linux distributions and so on. Just support macOS, RHEL/SLES, Debian, Ubuntu and Windows. Everything else gets tagged with “UNSUPPORTED/WONTFIX”. But please don’t complain when your favorite operating system is not supported. Or, you know, we could just stop trying to tell others what targets to use. And, FWIW, Rust is actually getting support for more architectures thanks to the GCC codegen and GCC frontend.

dwheeler 4y ago
Why so many architectures? Ensure your software can only run on Windows: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide :-). Vive la difference.
sophacles 4y ago
You're welcome to do it that way for your software. Others are allowed to choose some subset or superset of your choice. If they don't like your choice, they are allowed to fork the software to support what they want. Case in point - the gcc projects for rust are not officially supported by rust. They are alternative rust compilers - the authors of those have explicitly stated they will follow the features (etc) of the official rustc, and maybe the rust language team will consider those other compilers when designing new features, but it's not on the rust language team to do so. Another case in point - many projects don't support most linux distros. The job of the linux distro is maintain a fork (usually in the form of patches against upstream in the source package) of the software that works well with their system.
orbital223 4y ago
> Or, you know, we could just stop trying to tell others what targets to use. If it's not ok to tell others what targets to use, then it's also not ok to tell others what targets to support.

dwheeler 4y ago

Why so many architectures? Ensure your software can only run on Windows: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide :-). Vive la difference.

sophacles 4y ago

You're welcome to do it that way for your software. Others are allowed to choose some subset or superset of your choice. If they don't like your choice, they are allowed to fork the software to support what they want. Case in point - the gcc projects for rust are not officially supported by rust. They are alternative rust compilers - the authors of those have explicitly stated they will follow the features (etc) of the official rustc, and maybe the rust language team will consider those other compilers when designing new features, but it's not on the rust language team to do so. Another case in point - many projects don't support most linux distros. The job of the linux distro is maintain a fork (usually in the form of patches against upstream in the source package) of the software that works well with their system.

orbital223 4y ago

> Or, you know, we could just stop trying to tell others what targets to use. If it's not ok to tell others what targets to use, then it's also not ok to tell others what targets to support.