compiler-team VS Cargo

> Also, why aren't we size-sorting fields already?

We are for struct/enum fields. https://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reo...

There's even an unstable flag to help catch incorrect assumptions about struct layout. https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/457

Are you talking about https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688 ? I think that issue provides a lot of interesting context for this specific improvement.

And mips64, which rustc recently dumped support for after their attempt to extort funding/resources from Loongson failed:

https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/648

This is the biggest problem with the LLVM mentality: they use architecture support as a means to extract support (i.e. salaried dev positions) from hardware companies.

GNU may have annoyingly-higher standards for merging changes, but once it's in there and supported they will keep it for the long haul.

See https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/688

The work has been going on for some time now and it seems we are quite close to it being enabled as a default for nightly builds, I am super thrilled upwards of 20% faster clean builds and possibly more are on the horizon. Hope everything works out without triggering some unseen ICE. https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/681 Edit: If you want to discuss this feature reach out on Zulip

I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2].

They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win 8. That means they are no longer going to guarantee that the project builds on those platforms and passes all tests via CI.

As long as it is feasible they will probably keep CI runs for those platforms and if interested parties step up and provide sufficient maintenance support, it will remain tier 2. i.e a guarantee that it builds on those platforms via CI but not necessarily that all features are supported and guaranteed via passing tests.

If interested parties can provide sufficient maintenance that all tests continue passing, it will be tier 1 in all but name. However the rest of the development community won't waste their time with issues like Win 7 and 8's partial support for UTF-8.

And once CI stops being feasible for the compiler team to host, it'll drop down to tier 3. If there's sufficient interest from the community towards maintaining these targets, in practice you should see comparable support to with tiers 1 or 2 however now any CI will be managed externally by the community and the compiler team will stop worrying about changes that could break compilation on those targets.

TLDR: They aren't saying "it'll no longer work" but rather "if you want it to stay maintained for these targets, you have to pitch in dev hours to maintain it and eventually support the infrastructure to do this because we don't see a reason to continue doing this". So if you care for these targets, you'll have to contribute to keep it maintained.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651

(The already broken) XP support was removed almost 3 years ago: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/378

Installing Trunk happens through Cargo. Remember, Cargo is more than a package manager, it also supports sub-commands.

Dependency Management in Other Languages: We've discussed Python and Node.js in this article, but dependency management is a universal concept in programming. Exploring how you handle dependencies in other languages like Java, C#, or Rust could be beneficial. (I think Rust's cargo is an excellent example of a package manager.)

Nice hack! Would it have been possible back then to use cargo to pull in some dependencies?

The clean solution of cargo script is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12207

Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).

I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.

Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.

The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

--no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

You try to use it as a part of multi-language project, with an external build tool to tie it all together, and you discover that --out-dir flag is still not stabilized over some future compatibility concerns.

To create a new application we'll use cargo (a build tool and also a package manager for Rust. It is used for scaffolding new library/binary projects). So in your projects folder, you can run this command in your terminal:

> ...but at the end of the day Cargo is the reason that Rust is popular.

FWIW, maybe that's true for you, but there are numerous other advantages to the language for which many people choose to use Rust--some even "despite" Cargo: you see Google having had to put in way way WAY too much work to get Bazel working for Rust :/--that it honestly feels a bit like belittling an extremely important language to make this claim so flippantly.

> You can set a default build target for a Cargo project with two lines of configuration, no nightly features necessary...

This doesn't work as, as soon as you start setting target-specific options, it infects the host build, as they incorrectly modelled the problem as some kind of map from targets to flags. If you don't believe me, on your Linux computer, try cross-compile something complicated that will runs on a "least common denominator" Linux distribution, such as CentOS 7.

> Can you clarify what this is referring to?

Sure. I've Googled rust cargo target host bugs for you (which, FWIW, finds a number of bugs I've filed or have talked about, but it isn't as if I have a list anywhere). Note that one of these bugs is "closed", but I still provide them for context as a patch might have been merged but (as you'll find out if you read through all of these) it isn't stable.

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8147

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3349

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9322

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/9453

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9753

The result of this work being left incomplete is that increasingly large numbers of "serious" projects--things I'd expect people in packaging land to have heard of, such as BuildRoot--are being forced to set the ridiculous environment variable __CARGO_TEST_CHANNEL_OVERRIDE_DO_NOT_USE_THIS="nightly" in order to get access to a flag that makes Cargo sort of work.

(And yet, I often see people surprised at how long it is taking for various of the more important clients to fully get into using Rust, as the safety issues are so severe from continuing to use C/C++: as you made the contention that you believe the reason why people use Rust is Cargo, I will say the opposite: the reason why we don't see more Rust is also Cargo.)