What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross:

Dynamic linking with a safe ABI, where if you change and recompile one library then the outcome has to obey some definition of safety, and ABI stability is about as good as C or Objective-C or Swift.

Until that happens, it'll be hard to adopt Rust in a lot of C/C++ strongholds where C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge.

One particular chasm to keep an eye on, possibly even more relevant than Ubuntu using Rust: When it comes to building important stuff, Ubuntu sticks to curl|YOLO|bash instead of trusting trust in their own distributions.

https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...

Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...

Just today I found that rust-coreutils makes installing cuda toolkit impossible, related to use of `dd`: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/cuda-runfile-wont-extr...

Really good references to "crossing the chasm" between early adopter needs and mainstream needs. In addition to the Ubuntu coreutils use case, I wonder what other chasms Rust is attempting to cross. I know Rust for Linux (though I think that's still relegated to drivers?) and automotive (not sure where that is).

The author refers to a few things that he thinks will appeal to the "early majority," but I feel like that's a weakness of the article. Is the author part of the "early majority?" (doesn't seem like it). Does he have the same problems that they have? How does he know?

.NET has a _huge_ platform library and you know what? It’s a pleasure. So many things are just the standard way of doing things. When things are done weirdly, you can usually get a majority in favour of standardising it.

Yes, there’s always a couple of people who really push the boat out…

I've been a fan of all rust-based utilities that I've used. I am worried that 20+ (??) years of bug fixes and edge-case improvements can't be accounted for by simply using a newer/better code-base.

A lot of bug fixes/exploits are _CAUSED_ by the C+ core, but still... Tried & true vs new hotness?

Sudo no longer supporting path inheritance kinda sucks

> Jon made the provocative comment that we needed to revisit our policy around having a small standard library. He’s not the first to say something like that, it’s something we’ve been hearing for years and years

It sounds to me like you "cross the chasm" a little too early. As a user I don't care about your "chasms" I care about high quality durable systems. This isn't the first time I've heard the "we'll change the std lib later" logic. I've yet to see it actually work.

a few weeks ago it was all about Zig, now it's all about Rust, Clojure or Elixir next?

Why am I hearing about Rust a lot these days? Did anything significant happen?

I don't care that the non-gnu coreutils are using rust. I care that they aren't GPL licensed.

This means Canonical can offer proprietary patches on top of these packages and sell them as part of their "enterprise" offerings and this gives me the ick.