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

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 least it is not well-tested).

References: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/1312 https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/issues/300

Regards, Sergey Fedorov macos-powerpc.org