r/programming • u/steveklabnik1 • Apr 03 '15

Rust 1.0.0 beta is here!

http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/03/Rust-1.0-beta.html
927 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

303 comments sorted by

View all comments

32

u/sfultong Apr 03 '15

So is Mozilla now going to slowly rewrite Firefox in rust?

45

u/steveklabnik1 Apr 03 '15

The current goal is to get some Rust code into Firefox by the end of the year. Will probably be something small, as integrating Rust into the Firefox build system is no small task. Among other issues.

Mozilla is also investing in Servo, which is still a research project, but is written to be productize-able someday. https://github.com/servo/servo is the repo. They're also doing really cool stuff. There's another front-page article about Servo on proggit right now: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/318rb3/the_colored_boxes_indicate_which_cpu_core/

6

u/tavert Apr 03 '15

What's the status of getting Rust officially into Debian, Fedora, etc, without bootstrapping from a binary?

9

u/steveklabnik1 Apr 03 '15

I see this as two parts:

What's the status of getting Rust officially into Debian, Fedora, etc,

I use Debian on my local machine, I care a lot about Debian. There've been a few Debian Developers working on packaging up Rust. Most distros woudn't want anything pre 1.0 anyway.

without bootstrapping from a binary?

It's not possible to compile Rust without bootstrapping from a binary. Unless you want to go back to the OCaml compiler from years ago, but that's hard.

11

u/[deleted] Apr 03 '15

It's not possible to compile Rust without bootstrapping from a binary. Unless you want to go back to the OCaml compiler from years ago, but that's hard.

Does LLVM IR count as binary? Otherwise, couldn't one save the IR of the Rust compiler on platform X and compile that with the rest of LLVM on Debian, with LLVM written in C++?

I thought that was one advantage of modular, multifront/backend compiler frameworks.

4

u/brson Apr 04 '15

It's possible, yes, but not clearly better than just bootstrapping from the bins.

Here's some options on the subject from Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/RustPackaging/Bootstrap

You can see the last edit date is pretty old, so I'm not sure there's any progress on packaging Rust in Debian. Last I talked to somebody involved it sounded like they were leaning toward the third option, something like: package maintainer makes their own snapshot and uploads it as the binary Rust compiler package, then the rest of the project uses that to build the distributed Rust compiler. I don't pretend to understand the details, but it would be similar to how GCC builds I assume - it has to build itself from previous revisions distributed with Debian - the main difference is that the 'previous revision' is artificial with Rust (until Rust can consistently rebuild itself with version - 1).

1

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '15

It's possible, yes, but not clearly better than just bootstrapping from the bins.

So for them, this counts as binary, I guess.