foundation.rust-lang.org VS mrustc

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.

No, you don't. Existential proof: mrustc ignores lifetimes. Just flat out simply ignores. It changes some corner-cases related to HRBT, yet rustc compiled by mrustc works (that's BTW mrustc exist: to bootsrap the rustc compiler).

Incidentally C++ is the only way to bootstrap rust without rust today.

https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

Well, there is mrustc[0], a Rust compiler that doesn't include a borrow-checker, so it's possible to compile (at least some versions of) Rust without a borrow checker, though it might not result in the most optimized code.

AFAIK there are some optimization like the infamous `noalias` optimization (which took several tries to get turned on[1]) that uses information established during borrow checking.

I'm also not sure what the relation with NLL (non-lexical lifetimes) is, where I would assume you would need at least a primitive borrow-checker to establish some information that the backend might be interested in. Then again, mrustc compiles Rust versions that have NLL features without a borrow-checker, so it's again probably more on the optimization side than being essential.

[0]: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57259339

> Maybe another memory safe language, but Rust has severe bootstrapping issues which is a hard sell for distros that care about source to binary transparency.

It is possible to bootstrap rustc from just GCC relatively easily, although it's a little bit time consuming.

You can use mrustc to bootstrap Rust 1.54: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

And from then you can go through each version all the way to the current 1.72. (Each new Rust version officially needs the previous one to compile.)

Have you tried this route : https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc ?

Mrustc supports Rust 1.54.0 today

There are three. The official one, mrustc (no borrow checker, but can essentially compile the official rustc) and GCC (can't really compile anything substantial yet). Only rustc is production-ready though.

That probably depends on what you mean by problematic. Having an ever increasing chain of dependencies isn’t the most desirable situation so there has been some work to trim the bootstrap chain. In 2018, when the blogpost I linked above was written, mrustc was used to bootstrap rust 1.19.0; now mrustc can bootstrap rust 1.54.0 so the chain to recent versions is much shorter than if all those intervening versions back through 1.19.0 needed to be built. https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc