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by gue5t 3662 days ago
Is the problem the OS, or the architecture/ABI? I wouldn't expect porting to a new OS to be terribly difficult, though it is a time sink since there's a fair bit of API surface to cover to get Rust's libstd ported, and you'd want to work with upstream so they know your platform matters.

If your OS doesn't look at all like UNIX, then you'll have to give up on libstd (which talks about "file"s and "processes" and such nonsense), but libcore (which presents data-structures and other logic, rather than IO, code) should be fine.
2 comments
jjnoakes 3662 days ago
It's a platform with a file format and linker sections that are currently unsupported by LLVM, among other issues.
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steveklabnik 3662 days ago
Windows isn't like UNIX, yet still supports libstd fully. That said, yes, if your OS is so different that it doesn't support files or processes or something, you'd have to stick with libcore. The standard library not so much UNIX-centric as it is "common OS features"-centric. We even went so far as to not pick the UNIX names for common functionality, which can often happen with languages that start on a UNIX and move out.
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gue5t 3662 days ago
Similarity isn't a clear-cut yes/no question, but the NT kernel is so similar to UNIX that it was able to adopt a second syscall ABI compatible with Linux. Present operating systems are basically a monoculture in terms of high-level design decisions; Rob Pike complained eloquently about this in 2000, and outside of possibly unikernel development (which still usually has a libc/unix-like layer implementing at least a filesystem) little has changed since: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
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steveklabnik 3662 days ago
Yeah, I'm very intrigued by unikernels myself; as far as I know, I'm the first person to have gotten an Iron web app running on Rumprun. I figured I'm the first because I had to send patches to make it work :)

I guess my point is that even if vague designs are relatively a monoculture, that still means that anything that fits inside that box is going to be reasonable to port over. And I'm glad that it's so easy to not use the standard library for other cases; my little kernel doesn't yet have processes or files, and Rust works for it just fine. Well, it doesn't have them yet, anyway... hopefully soon.

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