Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software
While rust certainly does a lot of things right, it is still a moving target with a relatively high velocity.<p>There is a python library that recently switched to rust (partially) and now cannot be build on several platforms.<p>This also means that very long-lived platforms will probably be forced to upgrade that library every half year or so in line with the development of rust.<p>I&#x27;d say such an initiative needs a long-term supported version of rust, similar to C99 or so.<p>And this does not even account for cargo. I know you don&#x27;t <i>have</i> to use cargo, but is that practical?<p>How are we going to maintain stable software for, say, ten years or more? Do we have anyone committed to providing a stable rust environment for these cases? Especially considering that rust has no ABI for dynamic libraries.<p>Oh and by the way: We need a way to bootstrap rust as well. The current distribution downloads binaries of the last one to build itself. <i>And</i> it ships with a vendored version of llvm.<p>So in conclusion: I really like the rust language. But I am concerned that it is still way too immature and to &quot;hip&quot; for long-running, stable projects.