foundation.rust-lang.org VS linux

Through the Fast Forward program, we give free services and support to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. We support many of the world’s top programming languages (like Python, Rust, Ruby, and the wonderful Scratch), foundational technologies (cURL, the Linux kernel, Kubernetes, OpenStreetMap), and projects that make the internet better and more fun for everyone (Inkscape, Mastodon, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read).

This is why some of the bigger programming languages have a consortium behind them, dedicated to maintaining the language and making decisions for its continued improvement. When you look at the logos at the bottom of the Rust Foundation page, you can see some pretty big names.

The Rust foundation, which is a nonprofit general (delaware) corporation with bylaws, employees, a normal legal existence. It owns the trademarks and domain names, acts as a legal and administrative point of contact when one is needed, and has I think operational and funding responsibility for infrastructure (crates.io, CI, etc.) The foundation has members which are almost all corporate sponsors who donate money (and sometimes people) to further its mandate. There's a fairly broad set of companies involved here: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Huawei, etc. etc.

When you say enterprise, who do you mean? Rust is absolutely being pushed by faang et al for example. Just look at the bottom of the Rust foundation page[0]. You do not see this support for things like Nim or Julia[1].

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/

The Rust language is supported by the Rust Foundation, more details on that website. Financial donors to the Rust Foundation are about 30-40 companies currently, the bigger ones include Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Meta

> https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ 15,000

With all due respect, they don't need this money. Rust is a great project, and deserving, but they already have plenty of sponsors.

I would have rather seen 150 x $100 go to smaller projects. So much great software is being written, by people who are barely scraping by, and even $100 could be the motivation for someone to finish something widely useful.

So, let's clarify a couple things first about how the Rust and Cargo crates work. First off, there is no single company or entity who's the sole contributor to the core Rust tooling. Rust is an open source project to which anyone can view the codebase and contribute (though there's a select set of people who are responsible for approving changes to it and managing releases). It's worth noting this doesn't mean there isn't an organization responsible for the project however. The Rust Foundation are a non-profit who manages the core repositories and tooling, and is also responsible for setting high level goals for the language.

I don't think it is the same as Java. There is no single company owning Rust. Several big companies are investing in rust foundation (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/) including Google in particular which had quite a story regarding Java.

Recently, several big techs like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Amazon jointly launched a non-profit organization to help the language maintain itself by giving full support to the maintainers who lead and develop the project. Here at Vaultree we use Rust in our product and services, as we need to deliver data with reliability and agility to our customers, as we are in a business line where any error or inaccuracy can be costly, the adoption of Rust was a great fit for us.

You're missing on a lot of things Rust (or any language with non-toy types) can provide. Lock ordering, better accessible complex structures, enforcement of enumerated options, rich description of APIs, and many others. Atomic values are usable transparently https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/97c628055904a7f2ef1... and multithreaded reference counting is easily enforced https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/bd0a1a7d465fcb60685... also issues like type confusion https://www.vicarius.io/vsociety/posts/a-type-confusion-bug-... are less likely if you can easily use tagged unions checked by the compiler.

From the gpu issue tracker[0]:

> For a bit of context -- Google Maps loads images to the GPU at.. inopportune times. While games would typically load their images during a load screen (so slow image loading just means longer loading screens), Google Maps loads when scrolling around I think (so slow image loading means the whole map stutters). I don't think there's a fundamental driver bug we can fix here, but we can make image loading a lot faster which makes the symptoms go away.

[0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72#issuecomment-1...

> Is this mostly just a thing to get more young people interested in kernel development...allowing them to start out in less important areas and in a language they are passionate about?

Not likely. At the moment you need to do extra work to get Rust working well. It's not exactly beginner friendly and doing work in the kernel, you'll need to dig into C anyway.

> Or is this a serious proposal about the future of operating systems and other low level infrastructure code?

Serious code already exists, so... Yes?

> Do you just program everything in unsafe mode? What about runtimes?

Why would you? You need that only when interfacing with something that can't hold the Rust compiler assumptions. See for example https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/gpu/rebase-6.4/driv...

The few places that need direct access / unsafe are almost all single-line areas with an explanation.

I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited.

I am using Asahi Linux and the GPU driver works great, it even supports OpenGL 3.1 (https://asahilinux.org/2023/06/opengl-3-1-on-asahi-linux/). Definitely not alpha, I would say it's close to a "release candidate". Many bugs got resolved, nothing much left (besides newer OpenGL and Vulkan of course, but current state is very stable): https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/72

There aren't really any non-trivial mainline modules, since the Rust support is so new. There's the non-mainline Asahi M1 GPU driver though! It will eventually be mainlined, but IIRC some more Rust support code needs to be mainlined first.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/asahi/drivers/gpu/d...

You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/91