Rust is a language for building foundational software (opens in new tab)

(corrode.dev)

12 pointsalpha_trion7mo ago4 comments

4 comments

Matthias's suggestion about reframing the context of the purpose of the Rust language struck a chord with me. His post is building a bit off of Niko Matsakis's blog post about the same concept but goes a bit more in depth. There is a perception of Rust as being just a "systems programming" language when really it is a language for building "foundational software".

scrubs7mo ago

Foundational software ... is too vague to be useful. Foundational for who, what, what domain? Not buying it ...

thesnide7mo ago

My main issue with rust is that it only target mainstream archs.

For any new arch, first there is an asm, then a C compiler.

Imagine i'm designing a new CPU, how difficult is it to have a direct rust-to-asm compiler for it? And the runtime?

So rust has its uses, but only for its targetted archs. Old or esoteric ones are sol.

steveklabnik7mo ago

Rust has the same amount of runtime as C. And since it uses LLVM on the backend, there’s motivation for companies to support codegen via it to build that C compiler; even Intel has retargeted their compiler on top of it these days.

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