Gregory's ServerLike, Rust is pretty cool, I'm excited about it sometimes, but people, if you want to be the replacement for C you *HAVE TO EMBRACE DYNAMIC LINKING*. That is the primary role that C has played in the last few decades, being a lingua franca library system. Don't fight it, embrace it!
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 @cwebber (trolling) I'll embrace Rust when I can use it as a scripting language under gcc.  Since people keep bringing it up yes I know about cbindgen yes I know it's possible, this is me pointing out the irony and downfall of a toxic and self-defeating cultural practice in the Rust community which I have experienced firsthand  @cwebber I wrote about this behaviour in the rust community back in 2016 (https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR) and I guess not much has changed since then :blobcat_thisisfine:  @ansuz Freenet actually got hit by its decade-long-inactive founder suddenly starting to rewrite something adjacently similar in Rust while gutting the essential features ("privacy is not a goal of …") and putting in crypto-contracts … https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html @cwebber @haskal @cwebber I mean yeah, any sort of dynamic linking is going to need some ABI, and supporting that is inevitably going to be some work for someone somewhere. but I think the point stands that dynamic linking still allows for some cross-language compatibility that static linking doesn't really allow at all.  @imyxh @haskal @cwebber Unless it's built for that purpose. AmigaOS libraries are all statically linked, and they're shared across a wide variety of programs and languages. The OS itself is written as a collection of these libraries (most in C, dos.library in BCPL at one time), which nearly all apps use. Apps take on a variety of languages from BASIC to BCPL to Modula-2 to C to interpreted languages like ARexx. It's not impossible. Just not done under WIndows or Linux. @imyxh @haskal @cwebber there's the windows way, that every dynamic library is accompanied by a static library that dlopen()s it and calls it. or at least it used to be this way two decades ago. i'm not sure why they did that but these static libraries can be translated to different languages and implement an ffi internally. @cholling @haskal I do think it's annoying that C has become the lingua franca. Rust could provide an alternative, that would be a good initiative on its part. It would still require dynamic linking. Support for the C ABI isn't the primary thing I'm advocating for, it's pointing out that dynamic linking is where C has had the most success.  @cwebber i don't think i understand your point. currently it's straightforward, using standard tooling, to make a rust dynamic linked shared library and export C headers for it. a lot of mozilla projects are doing this @haskal yes, you can do it. but you aren't having conversations with the same people in the Rust community as I have, clearly. (Notably all the annoying Rust developers are cis dudes, and most of the cool ones are trans girls, who don't typically share this same attitude. Despite the fediverse's reality distortion field, that's not the majority of Rust devs in the wild) @cwebber i mean i could write an imagemagick in rust today and export even fully imagemagick-compatible C bindings and have a drop in replacement shared library @cwebber langs that are supposed to be better but don't support like irritate me so fucking much. I don't want to download another fucking package manager and repository and deal with all that shit!! just let me use the tools that Already Exist and Work  @cwebber  @cwebber Yeah, it's pretty much why we're probably still going to have ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick for the next bunch of years.
Rust honestly feels like they make their own bubble instead of taking operating systems as an existing whole and just replacing bricks from it. @complexmath @cwebber rust uses platform libraries, allows you to build dynamic libraries with C ABI's, etc. the main issue with dynamic libraries in rust is that the story for building dynamic libraries with rust ABI's and using them in your rust code is poorly supported. so usually even when you build a dynamic library you statically link all of your rust dependencies @complexmath @cwebber i definitely agree that rust's ecosystem tends to be hostile to dynamic linking, but it seems like from this thread that a lot of people are getting the impression that rust doesn't allow dynamic linking at all, and that just isn't true @iitalics @complexmath Yeah. I added a followup clarifying that it's a cultural problem most especially https://octodon.social/@cwebber/110707218268221920 (And a lot of this comes from inheriting the LLVM toolchain, where that attitude also exists.) @complexmath the technical issues are the same since rust more or less copied c++'s compilation model, down to using the same backend (llvm) @cwebber so. Thoughts on Zig, which can do dynamic linking afaik? And it's also a lot more directly compatible with the c abi due to explicit keywords for it? @cwebber  @cwebber i am horrified that THIS is considered a systems language. Everytime i have approached this ecosystem my feeling has been atrocious. The syntax. The runtime. The restrictions. The myriad of nodejs like online packages. The emptiness of the core libs that require these packages. The number of "unsafe" required to make it work in the kernel. This might not be a shared feeling, whatever @cwebber oh god I feel you using rust both ways is awful. I have made so many patches for crates so it can dynamically link and also their insistence on running their own TLS stack and then compiling that in statically to my programs, I love to now be responsible for updating this singular TLS stack, in my application, that is statically built-in, putting all the responsibility on me and requiring me to update  @cwebber now I understand why there are 24 bajillion projects like "X, written in Rust", where X is some common thing written in C/C++ that we've taken for granted for years. |
@cwebber Agreed!