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

From: Michael Orlitzky <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:59:49 -0400

> We know for sure that NonStop currently does not support Rust at
> all, and that there are problems with porting Rust to Gentoo, but
> I'd like to hear what OSes and Architectures you use personally and
> professionally and why adding Rust would be a bad idea. Is it
> corporate policy? Is it that the Rust toolchain doesn't exist for
> your os/arch? Is it that Rust is a new language and isn't as battle
> tested as C? Something else?

There is no problem with supporting rust on Gentoo. Gentoo users build
from source, and rust is a problem for anyone who builds from
source. I'm writing this on a riscv/musl system. If there are no
binaries for your CPU/libc, let me tell you, it's not fun. And this is
like, my job. A normal person would be completely helpless.

Nevertheless, the arch support issues are secondary. I'm sure it's a
lot of fun for the people who are writing rust code to do cargo
updates in the two or three directories they work in all day. But I'm
not writing rust code, don't care what language git is written in, and
have hundreds of other packages to keep up-to-date on multiple
machines. I want to be able to use my package manager to do that
efficiently. You know, the main tangible benefit of using a linux
distribution.

But every distribution is "packaging" rust the same way. They're
bundling random old versions of crates in violation of their own
policies because the ecosystem is unstable and the tooling encourages
tight coupling. By requiring rust, you are require me to go back to
managing dependencies like I'm on Windows XP again. Git is the most
important program I use, but it's not more important than package
management itself.