this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Linux

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Redox OS - an OS built entirely out of Rust (www.redox-os.org)
submitted 10 months ago by ChiefSinner@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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This isn't Linux, but Linux-like. Its a microkernel built from the rust programming language. Its still experimental, but I think it has great potential. It has a GUI desktop, but the compiler isn't quite fully working yet.

Has anyone used this before? What was your experience with it?

Note: If this is inappropriate since this isn't technically Linux, mods please take down.

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[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 6 points 10 months ago

You can load Rust into Python just fine. In fact, several packages have started requiring a Rust compiler on platforms thst don't get prebuilt binaries. It's why I installed Rust on my phone.

The build files for Rust are bigger than you may expect, but they're not unreasonably big. Languages like Python and Java like to put their dependencies in system folders and cache folders outside of their project so you don't notice them as often, but I find the difference not that problematic. The binaries Rust generates are often huge but if you build in release mode rather than debug mode and strip the debug symbols, you can quickly remove hundreds of megabytes of "executable" data.

Rust can be told to export things in the C FFI, which is how Python bindings are generally accomplished (although you rarely deal with those because of all the helper crates).

Statically compiled code will also load into processes fine, they just take up more RAM than you may like. The OS normally deduplicates dynamically loaded libraries across running processes, but with statically compiled programs you only get the one blob (which itself then gets deduplicated, usually).

Rust can also load and access standard DLLs. The safety assertions do break, because these files are accessed through the C FFI which is marked unsafe automatically, but that doesn't need to be a problem.

There are downsides and upsides to static compilation, but it doesn't really affect glue languages like Python or Typescript. Early versions of Rust lacked the C FFI and there are still issues with Rust programs dynamically loading other Rust programs without going through the C FFI, but I don't think that's a common issue at all.

I don't see Rust replace all of C either, because I think Rust is a better replacement for C++ than for C. The C parts it does replace (parsers, drivers, GUIs, complex command line tools) weren't really things I would write in C in the first place. There are still cars where Rust just fails (it can't deal with running out of memory, for one) so languages like Zig will always have their place.