First of all, sometimes I write in a stream of consciousness half-jerking style. It's not meant to be taken 100% seriously. I thought the writing style itself, when I do that, makes that clear!

Secondly, whatever that is of real technical value from the Ferrocene project, wasn't sold well by that ad. This could be by design, and maybe no one here would fall under the target audience of it. But then, I would question the point of posting this ad here in the first place.

Thirdly, the ad mentions nothing regarding Ferrocene's general availability (binaries, source, source+binaries, neither), nor is there any mention of software licenses. I think you would agree that mentioning this directly in the ad would have made it infinitely more informative for readers around here.

[–] snaggen@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

You are free to see this as an ad, but as Rust is targeting safety critical programming in general, I find it interesting to follow certification efforts like this to make rust available for really safety critical use cases. Now, the Ferrocene project is contributing back, but that fact or the license does not really affect the relevance for this community.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is indeed clear that you're kidding, but it's not clear that you understand what a certified compiler is for. It's not like RHEL, and it has nothing to do with licensing or even packaging/distribution. It's also not something that Ferrocene needs to "sell" in the sense of convincing users to migrate to it from rustc: either you need a certified compiler and you therefore can't use Rust at all until one exists, or you don't need one and there's no reason to wait for one to exist.

You're correct that bureaucracy is effectively the reason why the concept of compiler certification exists, but it seems like you're ignoring the fact that the devs burdened by this bureaucracy generally don't have a choice in the matter.

[–] BB_C@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s not like RHEL

The parallels between this and RHEL (including RHEL derivatives like Oracle Linux) are maybe longer than you think.

it has nothing to do with licensing or even packaging/distribution.

Not sure what you mean. I don't think I implied that that's the point of certification.

But:

Isn't Ferrocene going to be a downstream* certified compiler?
Won't that compiler need a software license?
Won't that compiler be packaged and distributed (a cloud-only offering would presumably be off the table, at least for "serious clients")?

I think all of this is very much relevant info to know.

* "downstream" is the fifth word in the article/ad.

It’s also not something that Ferrocene needs to “sell”

Something is being sold by Ferrous Systems. I don't think that's a point of dispute by anyone!

Now, what that something exactly looks like will depend, in part, on the answers to the questions above, no?

in the sense of convincing users to migrate to it from rustc

I didn't argue that. I don't think anyone argued that.

In case you didn't realize, the quintessential Arch user wouldn't be the target of a RHEL sales pitch either 😉 .

And now any remnants of a joke are ruined by all the explaining.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

...yeah, sorry, I honestly can't tell what point you were trying to make, even with the explanation. You call it an "ad" but also say they're not trying to convince users to migrate, so what do you think they want?