Comment by pjmlp
2 days ago
Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of such projects, without alternatives.
GCC, GNOME, KDE, Linux kernel, BSD variants, CUDA, RocM, OpenCL Vulkan, DirectX, Metal, GNM(X), OpenMP, OpenACC, NVN,....
Hence why somehow fixing C and C++ is also quite relevant for the upcoming decades, assuming humans still matter on the planet.
Now it is going to be ARM MTE, SPARC ADI, CHERI, Fil-C, or WG14 and WG21 actually getting their act together, remains to be seen, as it is subject to governments and industry pressure, and we not destroying civilisation.
> GCC
Isn't needed if we rewriting anything in Rust anyway.
> GNOME, KDE
They aren't that huge. Huge is the overall codebase of applications using them. It's relatively easy to create a native Rust GUI framework and rewrite applications needed such a framework one by one.
> Linux kernel
It's a good opportunity to rewrite it. Not only because modern languages like Rust are better than C, but because such a rewrite allows getting rid of old stuff present only for historical reasons.
> BSD variants
Aren't needed if we writing a new kernel from scratch.
> CUDA, OpenCL
Not a huge problem. There are dozens of GPU-related languages. Adding one more isn't that problematic.
> Vulkan, DirectX, Metal
They are language-agnostic (but still unsafe). One can create an implementation in something other than C.
The fallacy starts that Rust depends on GCC and LLVM, and someone will keep adding code to them.
Likewise with all the industry standards based on C and C++.
Looking forward to see how COSMIC ever manages to gain adoption beyond System 76 computers.