Alpine Linux: Proposal to move Rust to main

Alpine Linux: Proposal to move Rust to main(gitlab.alpinelinux.org)

187 points by thecatster 4 years ago | 63 comments

pdimitar 4 years ago |

This might be a little side-topic but IMO Alpine is famous for having a small byte size footprint.

I love Rust to tears but it produces fairly huge binaries even in release mode and even with some symbols stripping.

So if Alpine also plans to include various Rust tools I'd hope that this will prompt the core team to also work on reducing the sizes of the final Rust binaries.

I don't want to sound entitled! I am very thankful to the entire Rust team. And Rust is hugely important nowadays. It's just that when it comes to distributing stuff in Dockerfiles (and fly.io, and several others) the Rust binaries stick out like a sore thumb. :\ They're fairly big.

raggi 4 years ago | |

This is definitely an area it would be great to see more work in. On Fuchsia we started linking the rust stdlib dynamically, but there are some significant ABI constraints to doing this in a traditional Unix shared library ecosystem that we're able to avoid due to the isolated and storage-deduplicated nature of the package system.

If you do link rusts stdlib dynamically, then you end up with binaries that are equivalent to C++ binary sizes with an external libc++, where rusts stdlib is approximately the same size as libc++, and the release mode stripped binaries are also comparable (within ~1kb of each other, and in the range of 10kb for a standard unix pipeline style application which does some basic stream processing of IO).

brundolf 4 years ago | | |

Is dynamically linking Rust's standard library officially-supported or did you have to hack around that? I know static-linking is the default but I've never looked into doing otherwise

pdimitar 4 years ago | | |

I am definitely not as well-versed as you -- but for now I'd stick with Rust's statically linking nature. What I am more looking for is to have some very aggressive tree-shaking at the final phases of Rust compilation/linking where the tooling can prove that in your program, say, 73% of the stdlib isn't used at all so it can just remove it from the final binary.

It's my view that as deployment moves more and more to containers and even to the "microkernel + your app only" model then being able to fit binaries in CPU caches will become crucial for the viability of such cloud hosting. (Although to be fair, when we're talking about Rust + the Linux kernel, running something in 25ms vs 5ms can't be a huge deal for 98% of all apps, right?)

pdimitar 4 years ago | |

Not sure why I am eating the down arrows but I'd like to specify: I just tested on a few projects of mine and the binary size reduction is definitely more aggressive and better-looking compared to a year ago. Very happy with the gains! I am leaving my original comment above anyway since there's IMO still some room for improvement.

For comparison, without LTO and stripping I've had a fairly small hobby project easily compile to ~3MB and with them it's now ~800KB which is nearly 400% improvement. Nice.

dijit 4 years ago | |

Is alpine really going for “small” though?

I’m not saying they’re not small and haven’t done a fantastic job, but my impression is that this is due to being mostly minimal in the default install;

The reason I say this (and I could be wrong) is because the use of musl for the libc means each binary kinda needs to include it’s own libc statically.

This must make the binaries huge!

Also, you can easily make small rust binaries, it’s Golang (of the two) that produces very large binaries.

If you just follow the first two bits of advice from: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust you’ll reduce your binary sizes to near C++ levels.

AndyKelley 4 years ago | | |

> the use of musl for the libc means each binary kinda needs to include it’s own libc statically.

This is factually incorrect. Musl supports dynamic linking and if you run `ldd` on any binary in Alpine you can see that it dynamically links against musl libc.

psd1 4 years ago | | |

In your link, I really enjoyed this link on creating a 45-byte executable: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...

phendrenad2 4 years ago | |

Trust in open-source's ability to populate all niches. If Rust is added, and it significantly bloats up the Alpine image, someone will come along and make Alpine-Classic or Montane Linux or something.

gizdan 4 years ago | |

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but from what I understood, this isn't about adding rust to the base alpine packaging. It's about showing it to be installed from the main repository. Currently it's available in the community repository.

pdimitar 4 years ago | | |

Ah, you understand me (and the post) just fine -- hence I mentioned that my comment is a bit out there and not exactly on topic.

I am simply wondering if this would prompt more interest in reducing Rust's final binary sizes, that's all.

speed_spread 4 years ago | |

Docker acts as late linker for dynamically linked apps, bundling shared libs and executable together. Statically linked Rust apps certainly go against the grain in that model but can often be made significantly smaller with some build and dependency tweaking.

Corrado 4 years ago |

>"With the introduction of Rust to the base system, it may be desirable to oxidize certain components which have high security value in the system."

This is such a great way to phrase this activity; I really hope it catches on with other projects.

bredren 4 years ago |

There was a thing in February where Python cryptography required rust, which broke docker-compose installs via pip. [1]

There was a fair amount of back and forth about version pinning—it affected a lot of builds.

Even the issue on the crypto package about it was fairly tense. Iirc, the dependency was rolled back.

[1] https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/8105#issuecomment-7...

olingern 4 years ago |

> It is assumed that by following the steps in this proposal that Alpine users will be presented with a functional Rust toolchain which has a maintenance window of 2 years, that is also supportable by the Rust community through its normal support channels.

I’m struggling to see the benefit of moving from community to main. It seems more symbolic and geared towards making certain guarantees for end users, but it’s hard to grok that

EwanToo 4 years ago | |

I think without that commitment, it's hard for the overall Alpine distribution and other teams working on it to use Rust as part of their toolchain.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4 years ago | |

> I’m struggling to see the benefit of moving from community to main

I think this is about using Rust in the Alpine distribution itself and having core components actually use Rust.

edoceo 4 years ago | | |

At this point it's just getting ready to have the future option of more core stuff in Rust. Step0:tooling; Step1:packages

LAC-Tech 4 years ago |

Alpines biggest issue isn't that it doesn't have rust in main, it's documentation. `apk` is a great package manager but a lot of it is undocumented and you need to read the source.

Mokou 4 years ago | |

Are the man pages insufficient?

LAC-Tech 4 years ago | | |

Yes

user5994461 4 years ago |

It's unfortunate that the example given is about supporting the Ansible package.

Ansible is a python software and Python doesn't support Alpine.

int_19h 4 years ago | |

Python supports Alpine just fine; indeed, the standard Docker Python images include Alpine variants.

If you mean binary wheels, PyPA packaging added support for Alpine wheels a few months ago (https://github.com/pypa/packaging/pull/411), and auditwheel support for the same just shipped today.