Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Introduce Rust and announce that it will become mandatorty
- From
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
- Date
- Sep 19, 2025, 18:41 UTC
- Message-ID
- <6674eb07df107d786b747ccd6dce4555d36d5d2c.camel@physik.fu-berlin.de>
- In-Reply-To
- <20250904-b4-pks-rust-breaking-change-v1-0-3af1d25e0be9@pks.im>
Hello Patrick,
On Thu, 2025-09-04 at 16:26 +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
Show 13 quoted lines
> this small patch series introduces Rust into the core of Git. This patch > series is designed as a test balloon, similar to how we introduced test > balloons for C99 features in the past. The goal is threefold: > > - Give us some time to experiment with Rust and introduce proper build > infrastructure. > > - Give distributors time to ease into the new toolchain requirements. > Introducing Rust is impossible for some platforms and hard for > others. > > - Announce that Git 3.0 will make Rust a mandatory part of our build > infrastructure.
I'm one of Debian's maintainers in Debian Ports and I maintain Debian unstable on older and more obscure architectures such as alpha, hppa, m68k, sh4 and sparc64.
Of all the architectures in Debian, there are currently four architectures that don't support rustc. Those are alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4 [1]. For m68k, the situation is special as both LLVM and rustc already support m68k but with Linux still defaulting to 16-bit alignment on this architecture [2], building LLVM and rustc is currently not possible. I'm working on a switch to 32-bit alignment though which is default for NetBSD/m68k and also what specified in the official SysV ELF ABI documentation.
In general, I'm not against introducing Rust support into existing projects. However, I wished projects would be a little more patient until either the GCC codegen in rustc called rustc_codegen_gcc [3] or the Rust frontend in GCC have become ready for prime time.
My hope would be that more talented Rust developers would help support the two GCC Rust projects so that these become ready for prime time sooner and that one of the last blockers for introducing the Rust language across a lot of open source projects would go away.
I'm not an expert with the Non-Stop operating system, but I could imagine that a working Rust frontend in GCC would ease porting the Rust language to that platform as well.
Cheers, Adrian
> [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=rustc&suite=sid > [2] https://wiki.debian.org/M68k/Alignment > [3] https://rust-for-linux.com/rustc_codegen_gcc > [4] https://rust-for-linux.com/gccrs
-- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913