<![CDATA[I'm ambivalent about Rust these days.]]>I'm ambivalent about Rust these days.

On the one hand, I love Rust's approach to safety. Meaning type safety, memory safety, and protection against data races. It's possible, and common, to build safe abstractions atop a small amount of unsafe code. Even a kernel for an embedded OS can have only a small amount of unsafe code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071117). A software stack written in Rust down to the bottom would have much less unsafe code than our current stacks.

1/?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/topic/dd6efb52-dc8d-43e4-8d28-5cbbc280cdc6/i-m-ambivalent-about-rust-these-days.RSS for NodeTue, 26 May 2026 16:43:14 GMTWed, 13 May 2026 07:16:44 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 15:12:08 GMT]]>@matt

I had see what the “HumanWare Mantis Q40 Braille display/note-taker” was!

https://store.humanware.com/hca/mantis-q40.html

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://ruby.social/users/stepheneb/statuses/116567908596176259https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://ruby.social/users/stepheneb/statuses/116567908596176259Wed, 13 May 2026 15:12:08 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 14:39:05 GMT]]>@freya @matt yo, that sounds goddamn awesome actually! however, I don't think you should go through the process of basically reinventing wayland, unless you want to rewrite all the things above it, which might be fine, but is also extremely time consuming in my view, it depends on what toolkit you're gonna use for the apps, how open would the platform be and stuff like that. I would recommend going with a minimal set of wayland protocols to get some apps to display, and then adding custom ones for the accessibility things wayland doesn't include, especially for that kind of device. Then, you can probably patch the toolkits for the apps you want to be available there to use those protocols where applicable, and there it goes, you only have to do half the work, not most of it 😛
Also, solar powered mesh networks? holy shit, that's straight out of solarpunk sci-fi movies lol, that'd be even more awesome than the phone part in isolation

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.stealthy.club/users/esoteric_programmer/statuses/01KRGWDVFF0TBDTJSS3GH4YC4Ahttps://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.stealthy.club/users/esoteric_programmer/statuses/01KRGWDVFF0TBDTJSS3GH4YC4AWed, 13 May 2026 14:39:05 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 14:28:52 GMT]]>@karolherbst @matt yes, I remember trying to compile wxpython crashing my computer, meanwhile the odilia screenreader compiles just fine on it. The efficiency issues of rust analyzer though, O yeah, that I do feel, I can't develop on this 4 gigs of ram, 2 cores computer the same way I can compile on it, so I have to use another machine for development. The matrix sdk is similarly heavy, and most of that is either type monomorphisation, macros, cryptography code, or all of the above. Another issue is that I doubt our current accessibility stacks would fit properly, and work within, the limitations you're thinking of, the only reason that braille device can do so is because it has its own custom stack. Putting the at-spi registry daemon, dbus, speech dispatcher and modules on it, then orca too, most of your precious processing cycles would be spent on context switching, and in that form factor, that becomes important. So yeah, I think the premise one should start from there isn't necessarily rust vs C or zig, but rather optimizing the accessibility stack. Newton is a good step in the right direction, or maybe p2p at-spi for the more conservative apps, and then the screenreader will have to not use speech dispatcher, but load its own tts and access the sound devices directly. Well, perhaps pipewire is allowed there after all, we aren't desperate enough for performance to use raw alsa. But yeah, if we're to consider the ideal distance between developers and users as being you can modify your running OS, replace components on the fly and so on, then the real issue there is choosing a compiled language, and we should be using, idk, lisp or something, maybe python, and have most of the OS itself be written in that, except the small things which absolutely can't be done that way because of the hardware interactions.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.stealthy.club/users/esoteric_programmer/statuses/01KRGVV4NYBBF7DMGDXJT0YTP7https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://social.stealthy.club/users/esoteric_programmer/statuses/01KRGVV4NYBBF7DMGDXJT0YTP7Wed, 13 May 2026 14:28:52 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 12:15:53 GMT]]>@freya Is the power consumption of the SAMA5D27 a major factor in your choice of SoC?

And, thank you for saying "screenreader, obviously". It's refreshing to hear about a project like this that aims to build in accessibility from the start.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116567215557899134https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116567215557899134Wed, 13 May 2026 12:15:53 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 12:04:26 GMT]]>@matt just one data point here, while I immensely enjoy fast compilation times on a powerful machine, at one point I contributed to the Rust compiler on a Chromebook with 2 1.1GHz cores, 4G ram and 32G disk.

I've mentored clippy contributors on android tablets with less than 4G RAM.

So yes, while rustc won't ever be optimal in terms of compile time, it is absolutely possible to use it from less beefy machines. And often one can set up guardrails through types etc. so that compilation will stop at typeck (which is pretty quick) until the code is correct.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://hachyderm.io/users/llogiq/statuses/116567170536623434https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://hachyderm.io/users/llogiq/statuses/116567170536623434Wed, 13 May 2026 12:04:26 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 11:12:24 GMT]]>@matt For making an user its own developer, the ideal is a language which need not compile and can be tested in real time, e.g. lisp and forth. Maybe something like they say about the 80s lisp machine, a machine programmed in a single language botton up and top down.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mementomori.social/ap/users/116444162589833032/statuses/116566965899744502https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mementomori.social/ap/users/116444162589833032/statuses/116566965899744502Wed, 13 May 2026 11:12:24 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 11:07:34 GMT]]>@matt THis is a really fascinating thread, I myself have been wondering lately what specifically makes rustc such a resource hog on those lower-power chips. Is it primarily the heavy lifting of proc-macros and crate expansion, or is the borrow checker's analysis just that computationally expensive? If the former, that seems like a problem that can be solved. If the latter, there are systems programming languages that compile way faster than Rust, see also Zig, but it doesn't provide the same safety features. It's not as unsafe as C, but you can still dereference null and get a crash.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/TheQuinbox/statuses/116566946900394612https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/TheQuinbox/statuses/116566946900394612Wed, 13 May 2026 11:07:34 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 09:14:06 GMT]]>@matt Though yes, the memory usage is bigger, so if you are memory constrainted you will run into issues.

But not sure there is a nice way out of this situation sadly...

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/karolherbst/statuses/116566500713667525https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/karolherbst/statuses/116566500713667525Wed, 13 May 2026 09:14:06 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 09:13:04 GMT]]>@matt I _highly_ doubt those assessments, because huge C/C++ code bases will compile for longer in my experience.

I think it always depends on what you are comparing to here. Sure there are other languages that compile faster, because they don't rely on the LTO way of doing things, but especially C++ are not better in terms of compilation speed.

I even had people complain about rusticl compile times, but the C++ drivers just took way longer looking at the data.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/karolherbst/statuses/116566496685715667https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/karolherbst/statuses/116566496685715667Wed, 13 May 2026 09:13:04 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:54:56 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing Oh, I forgot that we had talked about this topic before.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566425384973435https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566425384973435Wed, 13 May 2026 08:54:56 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:53:32 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing If you've got some time to kill, could you please run UnixBench (https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench) and post the results somewhere, maybe a gist? I know I might seem weirdly fixated on your anecdote, but yours is the oldest x86-based machine I've heard of so far that someone is using to develop an application in Rust, and I'd like to be able to compare it against other systems. Thanks!

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566419863751119https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566419863751119Wed, 13 May 2026 08:53:32 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:44:07 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing Ah, OK. Do you have LTO enabled in the release profile?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566382843030112https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566382843030112Wed, 13 May 2026 08:44:07 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:41:13 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing Was Rust compilation in particular painful before you upgraded the RAM to 8 GB?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566371425862156https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566371425862156Wed, 13 May 2026 08:41:13 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:31:14 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing I gather that incremental build is a debug build? If so, do you find that, for a desktop application using an all-Rust GUI stack, the debug build is noticeably slower than the release build on that 2009 MacBook?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566332208503831https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566332208503831Wed, 13 May 2026 08:31:14 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:25:10 GMT]]>Still, I can't help but wonder. Consider a counterfactual where the original ARM processor, the one that famously ran on about 100 mW (meaning that it could, by accident, run only on leakage current), had shipped in a personal computer that had been wildly successful, and it then became an industry norm that all personal computers going forward simply must use that little power. Where would we be now? Still writing large amounts of unsafe C code? Or would we have found a different path?

15/?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566308322867484https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566308322867484Wed, 13 May 2026 08:25:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:23:19 GMT]]>@matt I had the Amiga C compiler Matt Dillon (of FreeBSD and Dragon BSD) made and I tinkered with it. I think I used it as far back as the Amiga 2000, which I think only had 1MB. I probably upgraded it in some way, but don't remember details, probably 2MB. The 3000 used weird ass ZIP RAM, and I distinctly remember I upgraded it to 8MB. But, I'm confident I wouldn't enjoy working with those kind of limitations for serious programming.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mas.to/users/swelljoe/statuses/116566301074807962https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mas.to/users/swelljoe/statuses/116566301074807962Wed, 13 May 2026 08:23:19 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:19:10 GMT]]>@matt that's cool. I run primarily 100 percent with Braille unless Braille just won't read something.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://caneandable.social/users/EdenLinnea/statuses/116566284698967316https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://caneandable.social/users/EdenLinnea/statuses/116566284698967316Wed, 13 May 2026 08:19:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:16:37 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing What CPU model does that MacBook have? And how much RAM? Thanks.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566274717461132https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566274717461132Wed, 13 May 2026 08:16:37 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:15:04 GMT]]>OK, I guess Rust compile time isn't so bad on older computers that people actually use as personal computers. See this reply that came in from Bluesky. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:54jgbo4psy24qu2bk4njtpc4/post/3mlptu6oycc2g 5 seconds for a debug build on a 2009 MacBook. I feel better now.

14/?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566268602292767https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566268602292767Wed, 13 May 2026 08:15:04 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:07:44 GMT]]>@inkreas.ing How long does a release build take?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566239776106459https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566239776106459Wed, 13 May 2026 08:07:44 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:04:05 GMT]]>Were there other paths to a software stack with minimal unsafe code at the bottom that required far fewer machine resources to compile, that the industry chose not to take? Maybe the Rust Graydon wanted that had no future (https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html)? I guess it's kind of moot, because the industry didn't take one of those paths, meaning there's no big library ecosystem on which to build, say, a new personal computing platform with a TTS/Braille-first UI framework.

13/?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566225438291675https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566225438291675Wed, 13 May 2026 08:04:05 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:06 GMT]]>@swelljoe My first Linux box was a 486SX at 33 MHz in 1996. I think I put Linux on it when it still had only 4 MB of RAM. Hard to believe you could actually compile real C code, including the kernel, on that little.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566209739743953https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566209739743953Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:06 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 07:58:44 GMT]]>@matt maybe gccrs (when it’s ready) will be less resource hungry. There is also Mutabah’s compiler you can try now.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://hachyderm.io/users/yerke/statuses/116566204409014764https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://hachyderm.io/users/yerke/statuses/116566204409014764Wed, 13 May 2026 07:58:44 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm ambivalent about Rust these days. on Wed, 13 May 2026 07:58:23 GMT]]>So do we have to accept that some level of computing power well above that of a Pentium II is simply the baseline for a modern general-purpose computer? Maybe. Perhaps the idea of something like the Mantis Braille display, with its battery efficiency, being a general-purpose personal computer is simply an impossible dream that I have to let go of. But, that was always an extreme example anyway.

12/?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566203031107815https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cafe/users/matt/statuses/116566203031107815Wed, 13 May 2026 07:58:23 GMT