On Fri, Dec 01, 2023 at 02:36:40AM -0800, Boqun Feng wrote: > I don't speak for the Rust langauge community, but I think this is > something that they should improve. I understand it could be frustrating > that we find out the new stuff doesn't support good old tools we use > (trust me, I do!), but I believe you also understand that a higher level > language can help in some places, for example, SBRM is naturally > supported ;-) This answers half of the question: "Why are we even trying > to use it again?". C++ does that too (and a ton of other languages), and has a much less craptastic syntax (not claiming C++ syntax doesn't have problems, but at least its the same language family). Now I realize C++ isn't ideal, it inherits much of the safety issues from C. But gah, rust is such a royal pain. > The other half is how languages are designed is different in these days: > a language community may do a better job on listening to the users and > the real use cases can affect the language design in return. While we > are doing our own experiment, we might well give that a shot too. Well, rust was clearly not designed to interact with C/C++ sanely. Given the kernel is a giant C project, this is somewhat of an issue IMO. IIRC the way Chrome makes it work with C++ is by defining the interface in a *third* language which compiles into 'compatible' Rust and C++, which is total idiocy if you ask me. Some langauges (Zig IIUC) can consume regular C headers and are much less painful to interact with (I know very little about Zig, no endorsement beyond it integrating much better with C). > And at least the document admits these are "future possibilities", so > they should be more motivated to implement these. > > It's never perfect, but we gotta start somewhere. How about they start by using this LLVM goodness to implement the rust equivalent of Zig's @cImport? Have it use clang to munge the C/C++ headers into IR and squash the lot into the rust thing. The syntax is ofcourse unfixable :-(
