Speculative: Rust for base system components

[Enji Cooper]

> On Jan 3, 2019, at 11:44, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 12:32 PM Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at puchar.net> wrote:
>> >> That's precisely how ideas that most people disagree with get *pushed*
>> >> through by evangelists with confirmation bias! Like someone said
>> >> earlier in the discussion: does Rust add anything? The answer is a
>> >> resounding NO, save for bloat.
>> >
>> > And this is why one reason people say “FreeBSD is dying”.
>> >
>> dying for whom?

It’s mostly dead to developers I’ve run across. If I had a dime for each time that I heard a sysadmin/SRE say, “gee, I like FreeBSD, but I have to use Linux instead”, “what is FreeBSD?”, or “oh, that OS.”, I would be a bit richer.

Putting it this way, FreeBSD has been largely displaced by Linux in the datacenter because of mindshare (the large amount of advocacy by sysadmins/SREs, available documentation/training, etc), the fact that CI/distributed systems/VM support just works (allowing developers to deliver features to market or do opensource development more quickly), the fact that mobile/desktop mostly works with little to no tweaking (depending on the GNU/Linux distro/spin), etc.

> And who is getting punished? We're having an interesting discussion about a possible new technology to use and developing criteria to know when we will know if/when it's useful.

Apologies Warner—my goal in saying “shut up and code” (paraphrased), was to avoid continuing a bikeshed discussion, where there didn’t seem to be a lot of positive progress being made.

Repeated statements (over 2x) like “rust is bloat”; “rust will never be in the base system”; etc is imho, non-constructive criticism. That’s more of where I was trying to come from with my reply to this subthread a couple days ago.

Thank you for asking and pointing this fact out. I’m totally ok with continuing constructive discussion on the merits/demerits of python, rust, etc (keyword being constructive).

Thank you very much,
-Enji