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wahern • today at 7:10 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

Another year or three of insane memory and disk prices and people will come around.

A stable Rust ABI would be nice for not just Rust, especially if they refine or extend (formally or de facto) the SysV ABI to optimize passing and returning of discriminants. That could then smooth the way for developing these features in C and C++, such as a primitive error-result type that saw some brief attention in both C and C++ WGs a couple of years ago. Doing it properly--absolute minimum cost, ABI stable, and cross-language--seemed to require too much orchestration across the ecosystem so enthusiasm and ambition seemed to peter out. The work required for a stable Rust ABI could provide the inertia to get that done.