Rust is a language for building foundational software

Rust is a language for building foundational software(corrode.dev)

12 points by alpha_trion 268 days ago | 4 comments

alpha_trion 268 days ago |

Matthias's suggestion about reframing the context of the purpose of the Rust language struck a chord with me. His post is building a bit off of Niko Matsakis's blog post about the same concept but goes a bit more in depth. There is a perception of Rust as being just a "systems programming" language when really it is a language for building "foundational software".

scrubs 268 days ago |

Foundational software ... is too vague to be useful. Foundational for who, what, what domain? Not buying it ...

thesnide 267 days ago | |

My main issue with rust is that it only target mainstream archs.

For any new arch, first there is an asm, then a C compiler.

Imagine i'm designing a new CPU, how difficult is it to have a direct rust-to-asm compiler for it? And the runtime?

So rust has its uses, but only for its targetted archs. Old or esoteric ones are sol.

steveklabnik 267 days ago | | |

Rust has the same amount of runtime as C. And since it uses LLVM on the backend, there’s motivation for companies to support codegen via it to build that C compiler; even Intel has retargeted their compiler on top of it these days.