[Mesa-dev] Rust drivers in Mesa

[Alyssa Rosenzweig]

Cc'd.

On Sun, Oct 04, 2020 at 03:17:28PM +0300, Michael Shigorin wrote:
> 	Hello,
> regarding this proposal:
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2020-October/224639.html
> 
> Alyssa, Rust is not "naturally fit for graphics driver
> development" since it's not as universally available as
> C/C++ in terms of mature compilers; you're basically
> trying to put a cart before a horse, which will just
> put more pressure on both Rust developers team *and*
> on those of us working on non-x86 arches capable of
> driving modern GPUs with Mesa.
> 
> For one, I'm porting ALT Linux onto e2k platform
> (there's only an early non-optimizing version of
> Rust port there by now), and we're maintaining repos
> for aarch64, armv7hf, ppc64el, mipsel, and riscv64 either
> -- none of which seem to be described as better than
> "experimental" at http://doc.rust-lang.org/core/arch page
> in terms of Rust support.
> 
> And there's another problem: no kind of tooling helps
> careless developers avoid mistakes as many previous
> silver bullet candidates have shown already; some of
> those only made things actually worse.
> 
> I am no Mesa developer, my closest contribution to it
> is probably an LLVM patch proposal.  But I've seen
> enough deterioration brought with the best intents
> of course -- both in free software during last ten
> years or so and in real life (I used to live in Kiev
> but not anymore, Denis can witness that if needed).
> 
> PS: feel free to CC: mesa-dev@, of course.
> 
> -- 
>  ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin / http://altlinux.org
>   ------ http://opennet.ru / http://anna-news.info