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Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.
https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2
This is a good guide on building small Rust binaries: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust
This talks about going to extreme lengths on making the smallest Rust binary possible, 400 bytes when it was written, https://darkcoding.net/software/a-very-small-rust-binary-ind...
The thing is, you lose a lot of nice features when you do this, like panic unwinding, debug symbols, stdlib… for kernel and some embedded development it’s definitely important, but for most use cases, does it matter?
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.
> If you are equally picky and constrain yourself to parts of the ecosystem which care about binary size, you still have more options and can avoid size issues.
What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.
I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.
In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.
[0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.
[1] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.24/dependencies
[2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper/0.14.28/dependencies
> If you are equally picky and constrain yourself to parts of the ecosystem which care about binary size, you still have more options and can avoid size issues.
What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.
I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.
In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.
[0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.
[1] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.24/dependencies
[2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper/0.14.28/dependencies
> Downloading 3GB of dependencies is not a thing that happens in the Rust ecosystem. Reality is orders of magnitude smaller than that.
Assuming they're talking about the built size of dependencies that are left lying around after cargo builds a binary, they're really not exaggerating by much. I have no difficulty of believing that there are Rust projects that leave 3GB+ of dependency bloat on your file system after you build them.
To take the last Rust project I built, magic-wormhole.rs [1], the source code I downloaded from Github was 1.6 MB. After running `cargo build --release`, the build directory is now 618 MB and there's another 179 MB in ~/.cargo, for a total of 800 MB used.
All this to build a little command line program that sends and receives files over the network over a simple protocol (build size 14 MB). God forbid I build something actually complicated written in Rust, like a text editor.
[1] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole.rs
So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%
[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...
So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%
[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...