Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Eric McCorkle]

On 12/31/18 2:36 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> So exactly which "base system components" are we talking about ?
> 
> The largest non-contrib program we maintain in the tree, is ppp(8)
> and that is only 43KLOC.
> 
> That is not enough code to warrant a refactoring into a different
> programming language, in particular not when usage is so low that
> nobody has even bothered to merge the multi-link support from
> net/mpd5 in the last 10 years.
> 
> So the only piece of code I can imagine which would ever come close
> to qualifying, would be if somebody starts writing BSystemD(8)
> from scratch.
> 
> And I'm 100% convinced that people will want that optional and firmly
> segregated in a port for at least the first a decade.
> 
> And as far as I know, we *are* trying to make base more modular, and
> migrate it to pkgbase to make the attachment of/to ports more
> seamless, right?

That's an interesting point.  If the modularization effort ends up
providing the ability to replace parts of contrib with certain ports,
then it would be rather straightforward to create rust-based alternatives.

As for what I'd be keen to rewrite, I'd put security-critical bits like,
say, pam, kerberos, su, and such on the list.  I've also kicked around
the idea of trying to get a simple Rust-based EFI boot loader up and
going.  All of these would benefit from

WRT kerberos, I did have the base heimdal replaced with MIT kerberos
from ports for a while.  This mostly works (and has some benefits), but
unfortunately doesn't seem to be able to support kerberized NFS.

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