• 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
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    15 hours ago

    Granted, everyone is different. The cognitive load of Rust has been widely written about, though, so I don’t think I’m am outlier.

    Regardless, it’s not like either of us have any pull in the kernel (and probably never will). I fear for the day we let AI start writing kernel code…

    Absolutely never, in my case. This isn’t what concerns me, though. If Rust is harder than C, then fewer people are going to attempt it. If it takes several hours to compile the kernel on an average desktop computer, even fewer are going to be willing to contribute, and almost nobody who isn’t creating a distribution is ever going to even try to compile their own kernel. It may even dissuade people from trying to start new distributions.

    If, if, if. Maybe it seems as if I’m fear-mongering, but as I’ve commented elsewhere, I noticed that when looking for tools in AUR, I’ve started filtering out anything written in Rust unless it’s a -bin. It’s because at some point I noticed that the majority of the time spent upgrading software on my computer was spent compiling Rust packages. Like, I’d start an update, and every time I checked, it’d be in the middle of compiling Rust. And it isn’t because I’m using a lot of Rust software. It has had a noticeable negative impact on the amount of time my computer spends with the CPU pegged upgrading. God forgive me, I’ve actually chosen Node-based solutions over Rust ones just because there was no -bin for the Rust package.

    I don’t know if this is the same type of “cancer” in the vitriolic Kernel ML email that led to the second-to-last firestorm, but this is how I’ve started to feel about Rust - if there’s a bin, great! But no source-based packages, because then updating my desktop starts to become a half-day journey. I’m almost to the point of actively going in and replacing the source-based Rust tools with anything else, because it’s turning updating my system into a day-long project.

    Haskell is already in this corner. Between the disk space and glacial ghc compile times, I will not install anything Haskell unless it’s pre-compiled. And that’s me having once spent a year in a job writing Haskell - I like the language, but it’s like programming in the 70’s: you write out your code, submit it as a job, and then go do something else for a day. Rust is quickly joining it there, along with Electron apps, which are in the corner for an entirely different reason.