Re: Checking out src with Mercurial

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 12:19 PM Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
>
> >> The idea of having to build rust to get a "less resource demanding
> >> implementation" would be great comedy if it weren't such a serious
> >> problem.
> >
> > The Mercurial developers have an opinion that it is very difficult to
> > develop and maintain reliable software in C. So the search goes on for
> > the silver bullet - Python, Rust, Go, etc.
>
> Sure - but my point is that rust is extremely difficult to deal with,
> and is basically impossible on low-resource machines or unusual
> architectures.  For those who haven't been following along, there has
> been basicallya continuous tale of woe in pkgsrc-land for the last 6
> months at least, and perhaps that's fairly said to be multiple years.
>
> So the idea that Johnny can build rust on his vax and then use some
> hg-rust on it would be laughable, if it didn't point out that the people
> deciding to use rust appear not to care about anything other than a
> handful of OS/CPU types.

I'm not a Rust developer, but I had a lot of troubles with it in the
past. A particular program I needed was written in Rust with a bunch
of Cargo dependencies. Rust seemed to work OK on x86_64, but it could
not build its packages on armv7l or aarch64. I'm guessing mips and
powerpc would have trouble, too.

The program I needed was the Selenium Web Driver to fill-in web forms.
I actually had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because Rust could not
compile Web Driver and the Cargo dependencies for use in Firefox.

Jeff