All I want for X-mas is a system without Rust
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The web page at rust-lang.org starts with a nice credo:
A language empowering everyone to build reliable
and efficient software.
Rust has the reputation of being a safe language, that helps to
prevent nasty vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and so on. Some
organizations even promote to write software that converts C-code
into Rust-code.
All around the world software developers are embracing Rust, with
the result that our systems get more and more infiltrated by
dependencies on Rust. This even starts to touch elements of the
kernel.
Using Rust sounds very cool, but have you ever tried to install Rust
and Cargo from source? This requires quite a beefy computer. Don't
expect to be able to do that on a simple system with, say 4 GB RAM
or less. Which raises some questions about the words 'everyone' and
'efficient' in the Rust credo.
Developers should use crappy systems
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If you are looking for a show case to exhibit why developers should
not work on shiny, state of the art hardware, with super fast
processors and 128 GB RAM or more, and Gigabit network connections,
than look no further than Rust.
The result of developers working in such environments can be
experienced daily on the web. Web pages build with the most fancy
framework first takes ages to download and then lock up your system
with all the computations needed to render the page.
Developers should experience what it means to download, build, and
use their stuff on every day systems. This experience will help them
to discover the importance of keeping systems small and light weight.
It lays bare the elements of their products that need improvement on
these aspects.
Smol computers
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Computers with a less powerful system, with an older generation CPU
and somewhere around 4 to 8 GB RAM, are still very useful. Certainly
when run with a less demanding operating system like a BSD, and a
non-bloated desktop. There is no need to buy a brand new system
every three years, including all the environmental consequences that
comes with that.
Of course, this is common knowledge among the Gopher enthusiasts. We
all like such systems, run our favorite OS on them, and just keep
on using them. Compiling the lang/rust port on such a system is
very hard, if not impossible.
Currently it is still possible, by carefully selecting ports, to
build and run a system without Rust. Please, keep it that way.
