RE: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Introduce Rust and announce that it will become mandatorty

From: rsbecker@nexbridge.com <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
Date: Sep 20, 2025, 18:39 UTC
Message-ID: <000001dc2a5d$ea10ffe0$be32ffa0$@nexbridge.com>
In-Reply-To: <8799E6DB-FC85-4F71-A6C1-363D1AC8ED06@macos-powerpc.org>

On September 20, 2025 4:30 Am, Sergey Fedorov wrote:

>> but I'd like to hear what OSes and Architectures you use personally and
>professionally and why adding Rust would be a bad idea.
>
>I am the maintainer of ports for Darwin on PowerPC systems (few past years

in

>MacPorts and now in https://github.com/macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports fork)
>and contributor to GCC (gfortran). I have added the whole of current R

ecosystem

>into MacPorts and a decent support for modern Fortran via FPM.
>
>Those systems are still actively used, and thanks to GCC upstream support

of

>powerpc-apple-darwin I have been able to keep our ports pretty much on par
>(occasionally ahead of) what modern macOS has at the moment. A lot of work

has

>been done in past two-three years, including fixing/restoring support for

ppc for

>several major langs/compilers (gfortran, MLton, SBCL, Ruby, OCaml, Idris2

etc.),

>build systems etc.
>
>Git is essential for the version control, but also for the build systems of

MacPorts

>and CMake. Since my powerpc ports rely on MacPorts infrastructure (there

are

>40k+ ports), I need a working Git for my workflow.
>
>To be clear, I do not object to adding Rust optionally (as I would not

against adding

>optional modules for any language), but making it mandatory, while Rust is

still

>broken on a few, admittedly edge case, systems, hurts the open-source.
>
>I agree with John Paul Adrian that once gccrs becomes properly usable, or

otherwise

>gcc codegen in Rust acquires support for currently unsupported platforms,

things

>will change.
>
>P. S. I have contributed to mrustc, so it is not ideological. Though I do

think that

>ability to bootstrap from source is strictly required for a compiler to be

safe, and at

>the moment bootstrapping of Rust may not yet work for all supported

platforms (at

Show 5 quoted lines

>least it is not well-tested).
>
>References:
>https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/1312
>https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/issues/300

To clarify, gcc is not available on all platforms. The overlap where gcc is supported and Rust is support is likely high, but more, where gcc is not supported then it is highly unlikely that Rust is supported. mrustc is a difficult more that requires gcc even if that is not clearly stated - it does not build with c17, for example. This double requirement is making the probability of being able to continue to support git even less for me on NonStop. My team is working hard to push Rust availability and we realize that gccrs is an easier path, but those two are currently outside of our control because of complexities in the loader on NonStop.