4 ms·

If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern devel

by boricj 3y ago

If these architectures can't muster enough manpower to keep up with modern toolchains then they are living on borrowed time. Maintainers of active, modern development projects have a limited tolerance for anachronism before they say "get a modern toolchain up and running or get left behind, we're sick and tired of C89".

midmagico 3y ago
[flagged]
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  You go to parties where people are passionate about 32-bit PowerPC? ... can you invite me? This sounds great.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    They might be Amigans which seems like a pretty bad outcome. Look forward to an hour or more of someone who is enthusiastically wrong about a broad range of topics and has been scammed for thousands of dollars without learning a thing from the experience. Oh the new one is faster and cheaper, but you had to get in early to lock in the price? And the delays have really only been a couple of years? Right, yes...
    - LAC-Tech 3y ago
      Ha what a bunch of idiots (he says, typing this on his 40% ortholinear mechanical keyboard with two stage spring switches and POM blank keycaps).
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here, even if another comment is annoying.
duped 3y ago
If by "modern" you mean "LLVM" then I'm sure the chip vendors will get right on it when they have a GCC backend that works and all of their customers use it.
- boricj 3y ago
  There is a Rust front-end for GCC that is under active development [1]. If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end then they can start contributing to it as an alternative. [1] https://rust-gcc.github.io/ https://rust-gcc.github.io/
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    > If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end oh, my sweet summer child...
  - duped 3y ago
    You've got the prioritization backwards
mrweasel 3y ago
I feel like that might leave embedded devices without an upgrade path, and those are the devices that needs to longest "warning". So yes, borrowed time, but that might be a decade. That no to say that Rust shouldn't be considered, but maybe initially for new development or selective rewrites. Some of the mentioned, like nscd or devd in particular, shouldn't be that high on the list. The ZFSd should be fairly safe, as that's mainly needed on the larger platforms.
- patmorgan23 3y ago
  If those devices really need updates then the vendor can fork BSD and do the updates they need. It's not like the existing code will stop working on them. This is also why we LTS versions.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I feel like those are the kinds of devices that never get manufacturer updates anyway. And even if they did, the manufacturer likely is no longer supporting them. Sure, it's nice to be able to tinker and hack to see if you can upgrade them yourselves, but is it worth maintaining architecture support for that kind of use case? Not asserting that is definitely not, but I think it's worth considering.
pharmakom 3y ago
What if Rust compiled to C? Wouldn’t that be a good way to support long tail platforms with low effort?
- jcranmer 3y ago
  Not necessarily. C isn't a great language to target, since it's full of fun undefined behavior quirks that you will trip over if you look at it slightly cross-eyed. And part of the problem with the long tail platforms is that they can have issues that you don't expect (e.g., function pointers and data pointers might have different representation!). So the main set of platforms you're looking at are ones that are functional enough to have modern, stable C compilers, aren't too quirky that reasonably portable C code would "just" work, and yet ones that you don't already have support for in Rust. Outside of the embedded space, there's like... fewer than 5 architectures left, the most notable of which probably being Alpha.

by boricj 3y ago

midmagico 3y ago

[flagged]

LAC-Tech 3y ago
You go to parties where people are passionate about 32-bit PowerPC? ... can you invite me? This sounds great.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  They might be Amigans which seems like a pretty bad outcome. Look forward to an hour or more of someone who is enthusiastically wrong about a broad range of topics and has been scammed for thousands of dollars without learning a thing from the experience. Oh the new one is faster and cheaper, but you had to get in early to lock in the price? And the delays have really only been a couple of years? Right, yes...
  - LAC-Tech 3y ago
    Ha what a bunch of idiots (he says, typing this on his 40% ortholinear mechanical keyboard with two stage spring switches and POM blank keycaps).
dang 3y ago
Please don't do this here, even if another comment is annoying.

duped 3y ago

If by "modern" you mean "LLVM" then I'm sure the chip vendors will get right on it when they have a GCC backend that works and all of their customers use it.

boricj 3y ago
There is a Rust front-end for GCC that is under active development [1]. If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end then they can start contributing to it as an alternative. [1] https://rust-gcc.github.io/ https://rust-gcc.github.io/
- refulgentis 3y ago
  > If the chip vendors are not willing to develop and upstream a LLVM back-end oh, my sweet summer child...
- duped 3y ago
  You've got the prioritization backwards

mrweasel 3y ago

I feel like that might leave embedded devices without an upgrade path, and those are the devices that needs to longest "warning". So yes, borrowed time, but that might be a decade. That no to say that Rust shouldn't be considered, but maybe initially for new development or selective rewrites. Some of the mentioned, like nscd or devd in particular, shouldn't be that high on the list. The ZFSd should be fairly safe, as that's mainly needed on the larger platforms.

patmorgan23 3y ago
If those devices really need updates then the vendor can fork BSD and do the updates they need. It's not like the existing code will stop working on them. This is also why we LTS versions.
kelnos 3y ago
I feel like those are the kinds of devices that never get manufacturer updates anyway. And even if they did, the manufacturer likely is no longer supporting them. Sure, it's nice to be able to tinker and hack to see if you can upgrade them yourselves, but is it worth maintaining architecture support for that kind of use case? Not asserting that is definitely not, but I think it's worth considering.

pharmakom 3y ago

What if Rust compiled to C? Wouldn’t that be a good way to support long tail platforms with low effort?

jcranmer 3y ago
Not necessarily. C isn't a great language to target, since it's full of fun undefined behavior quirks that you will trip over if you look at it slightly cross-eyed. And part of the problem with the long tail platforms is that they can have issues that you don't expect (e.g., function pointers and data pointers might have different representation!). So the main set of platforms you're looking at are ones that are functional enough to have modern, stable C compilers, aren't too quirky that reasonably portable C code would "just" work, and yet ones that you don't already have support for in Rust. Outside of the embedded space, there's like... fewer than 5 architectures left, the most notable of which probably being Alpha.