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by dikaiosune 3463 days ago
It mostly scores a "YES", where there are footnotes. AFAIK all of these things are being worked on.

> Does it support all of the following architectures? x86_64, ARM, MIPS, powerPC

It does: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/getting-started.html#tier-2. Granted, while tier 2 support is pretty good, it isn't the same level of support as the tier 1 platforms.

> Does it support soft float?

From running `rustc -C help`:

        -C            soft-float -- use soft float ABI (*eabihf targets only)
> Can it link against uclibc instead of glibc?

It can link against musl, but I'm not sure whether that would enable uclibc. Probably?

> Can it link against arbitrary C libraries?

Yes.

> Can I use a C library's header.h file without having to hand-recode it to Rust?

You can use something like rust-bindgen (https://github.com/Yamakaky/rust-bindgen) which will work with a minimal amount of cleanup afterwards in my experience. Still not a resounding yes, though.

> Will the code I write now continue to compile 5 years from now?

Yes. See https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html for more about the plans/policies/etc.

1 comments

Great, thanks for the reply and links.

Sounds to me like the current state is "doable," but not "solid." I can convince myself to try it out, but not my whole company. But, maybe this will improve over time.

That seems like a fair summary to me. Several of these items (better interop with existing libraries, for example) came up in the recent 2017 roadmap RFC conversation, and I would expect them to improve in the future.

Also, if you do try Rust and find other issues that would be blockers for your company to pilot a project, I know that the teams have been very eager to get feedback from "systems" shops on what would be needed to get them trying Rust out commercially.