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Comment by freedomben

2 years ago

> The one platform we care about a bit that it does not currently seem to have enough support for is Cygwin, which is sad, but we have to make a cut somewhere.

> We’re also losing Cygwin as a supported platform for the time being, because there is no Rust target for Cygwin and so no way to build binaries targeting it. We hope that this situation changes in future, but we had also hoped it would improve during the almost two years of the port. For now, the only way to run fish on Windows is to use WSL.

I understand, but this is indeed incredibly sad. To this day I still use Cygwin, and in fact prefer it to WSL depending on what I'm doing. Cygwin is an incredible project that is borderline miraculous for what it accomplished and provides. Without Cygwin I may not have any sanity left. I can't exude enough love for the Cygwin team.

Hopefully rust will support cygwin as a build target in the future!

25 comments

freedomben

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_zagj  2 years ago

It's strange how the article starts off complaining about C++'s platform "issues":

> We’ve experienced some pain with C++. In short:

> tools and compiler/platform differences

before conceding that, because of Rust, they 1) are actually dropping support for a platform they previously supported and 2) can only support (in theory) a small fraction of those platforms supported by g++, but that that's OK because those are the only platforms which really matter. I get that it's a trade-off, but it would have been more intellectually honest to just admit this is one area (portability, backwards compatibility, and ABI stability) where C++ mops the floor with Rust, instead of pretending it's a another paintpoint Rust avoids.

  • mymoomin  2 years ago

    I don't see how the article is pretending anything. They had platform issues with C++ (portability and usability on the platforms they supported), and switching to Rust fixed those issues but gave them a different set of platform issues (they could no longer support Cygwin).

  • thayne  2 years ago

    Neither c++ nor rust is a clear winner in portability and platform support. C++ is available on more platforms, but in some ways rust makes it easier to support multiple platforms than it is in c++, for example using rustup to install the latest version of the compiler.

    What they got from this isn't that they can now support more platforms, but that they now don't have to spend as much effort on supporting dealing with differences between different platforms.

    • _zagj  2 years ago

      > Neither c++ nor rust is a clear winner in portability

      C++ is the clear winner in portability because of GCC and the wealth of platforms it supports. You can argue you don't care about supporting, e.g., OpenBSD on PPC, but trying to hand-wave away this advantage C++ has over Rust is disingenuous.

      3 replies →

  • IshKebab  2 years ago

    C++ may run in more places than Rust but that's nothing to do with how good the tooling is. C++ runs everywhere AND its tooling is abysmal.

  • aragilar  2 years ago

    Yeah, it's somewhat interesting that they point to Debian's popcon (which is opt-in), when the statistics are basically coming from amd64, whereas I think it would be much more interesting (if possible) to see what the number of installs of fish are on openwrt (and other embedded distros). Currently the openwrt fish install is ~2MB (which is massive on a router), I wonder what the new install size will be with the rust version, and if practically they've dropped everything except desktop/server linux and MacOS?

    • ComputerGuru  2 years ago

      Rust binaries, once stripped, are not necessarily much fatter than their C++ counterparts. We're not expecting a huge increase there.

      Embedded distros should still be supported, though you might need to cross-compile for a few depending on rust toolchain availability. Cygwin is supposed to be getting a working rust target at some point, but who knows?

      6 replies →

bloppe  2 years ago

genuinely curious: with so much love for cygwin, why not just run Linux? possibly with a dual boot?

  • 3eb7988a1663  2 years ago

    Corporate jobs are nearly always on Windows machines. Cygwin+GitBash can usually sneak past the gate without raising too many eyebrows. WSL is still voodoo dark mark that can require conversations to get IT to allow.

    • freedomben  2 years ago

      Exactly. I have been running Linux on my personal computer for 15 years now. But frequently for work purposes and corporate jobs I have to work on Windows.