grapl VS mrustc

https://github.com/grapl-security/grapl/

I just did a clean build `cargo build`, 19 minutes 44 seconds.

I added 1 line (`dbg!("foo")`) and it took 14.76s

Awesome. So, CURP was pretty inspiring for the work I did on Grapl. Grapl Schemas had to define conflict resolution algorithms.

https://github.com/grapl-security/grapl/blob/main/etc/exampl...

As you can see here, there are some special built-ins that aren't important (keys, timestamps) but you can see there's @immutable (FWW) and @increment_only.

This meant that our graphs formed a big CRDT, which meant that every operation commuted, which meant that we could do weird things with our consensus. Reads could happen on stale data, writes could be dropped, we could read from two inconsistent databases and resolve the inconsistency in memory, etc. I even hacked this into ScyllaDB by encoding each merge function into an integer, and setting that as the TIMESTAMP, for when replication merging happened to the values - this meant we could perform writes (repeatedly) without reading a value first, and with no coordination between nodes. What I didn't have was a native solution that could take advantage of these constraints.

As you can tell, this project is obviously very interesting to me. I ran through this pretty quickly but I'll dig in more soon. I'm just excited to see this.

Rust, Python and Go. Props to you for being sensible with technology choice.

https://github.com/grapl-security/grapl

That's great for you and your team, but looking at https://github.com/grapl-security/grapl it seems like your needs are pretty different from most web developers.

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