[motorest]

> There's at least one proprietary platform that supports Git built by via a vendor-provided C compiler, but for which no public documentation exists and therefore no LLVM support is possible.

That's fine. The only impact is that they won't be able to use the latest and greatest release of Git.

Once those platforms work on their support for Rust they will be able to jump back to the latest and greatest.

[jlarocco]

It's sad to see people be so nonchalant about potentially killing off smaller platforms like this. As more barriers to entry are added, competition is going to decrease, and the software ecosystem is going to keep getting worse. First you need a lib C, now you need lib C and Rust, ...

But no doubt it's a great way for the big companies funding Rust development to undermine smaller players...

[detaro]

It's kind of funny to see f-ing HPE with 60k employees somehow being labeled as the poor underdog that should be supported by the open-source community for free and can't be expected to take care of software running on their premium hardware for banks etc by themselves.

[jlarocco]

I think you misread my comment because I didn't say anything like that.

In any case HPE may have 60k employees but they're still working to create a smaller platform.

It actually demonstrates the point I was making. If a company with 60k employees can't keep up then what chance do startups and smaller companies have?

[nicoburns]

> If a company with 60k employees can't keep up then what chance do startups and smaller companies have?

They build on open source infrastructure like LLVM, which a smaller company will probably be doing anyway.

[jlarocco]

Sure, but let's not pretend that doesn't kill diversity and entrench a few big players.

[nicoburns]

The alternative is killing diversity of programming languages, so it's hard to win either way.

[squigz]

HP made nearly $60b last year. They can fund the development of the tools they need for their 50 year old system that apparently powers lots of financial institutions. It's absurd to blame volunteer developers for not wanting to bend over backwards, just to ensure these institutions have the absolute latest git release, which they certainly do not need.

[detaro]

Oh they absolutely can, they just choose not to. To just make some tools work again there's also many slightly odd workarounds one could choose over porting the Rust compiler.

[motorest]

> It's sad to see people be so nonchalant about potentially killing off smaller platforms like this.

Your comment is needlessly dramatic. The only hypothetical impact this has is that whoever uses these platforms won't have upgrades until they do something about it, and the latest and greatest releases will only run if the companies behind these platforms invests in their maintenance.

This is not a good enough reason to prevent the whole world from benefiting from better tooling. This is not a lowest common denominator thing. Those platforms went out of their way to lag in interpretability, and this is the natural consequence of these decisions.