Rust is for Professionals
Link: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/13/rust-is-for-professionals/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26793471
@bugaevc@mastodon.technology
Rust does seem great in many ways but when I was playing around with Linux From Scratch (LFS) it was a pain for me that one package I needed to build was written in Rust. Then I had to build rustc and it turned out that rustc could not be built from source without an internet connection. I had things setup so that I first downloaded all source code I needed, then as a second step I built everything from that source code.
(to be continued)
@bugaevc@mastodon.technology
For me, being a fan of free software and so on, this seemed like a bad thing with rust. I want to know what the source code is, including source code for compilers. I want to say "here is the rustc source code, now build rustc from source" without any extra downloads being necessary.
Do you understand what I mean?
Is this a real problem or is it just me not understanding? If so, could you explain?
@bugaevc@mastodon.technology
Building everything from source like that worked for everything except rustc, including the compiler gcc used to build most other stuff.
For gcc it was possible to download the source code of gcc and then build gcc from that source code.
That was not possible for rustc because when building rustc it insisted on downloading a bunch of stuff as part of the build process.
(to be continued)