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.
Ctrl+F for "NonStop" in https://lwn.net/Articles/998115/
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.
Ctrl+F for "NonStop" in https://lwn.net/Articles/998115/
Shouldn't these platforms work on getting Rust to support it rather than have our tools limited by what they can consume? https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs
A maintainer for that specific platform was more into the line of thinking that Git should bend over backwards to support them because "loss of support could have societal impact [...] Leaving debit or credit card authorizers without a supported git would be, let's say, "bad"."
To me it looks like big corps enjoying the idea of having free service so they can avoid maintaining their own stuff, and trying the "too big to fail" fiddle on open source maintainers, with little effect.
It's additionally ridiculous because git is a code management tool. Maybe they are using it for something much more wild than that (why?) but I assume this is mostly just a complaint that they can't do `git pull` from their wonky architecture that they are building on. They could literally have a network mount and externally manage the git if they still need it.
It's not like older versions of git won't work perfectly fine. Git has great backwards compatibility. And if there is a break, seems like a good opportunity for them to fork and fix the break.
And lets be perfectly clear. These are very often systems built on top of a mountain of open source software. These companies will even have custom patched tools like gcc that they aren't willing to upstream because some manager decided they couldn't just give away the code they paid an engineer to write. I may feel bad for the situation it puts the engineers in, I feel absolutely no remorse for the companies because their greed put them in these situations in the first place.
> Leaving debit or credit card authorizers without a supported git would be, let's say, "bad".
Oh no, if only these massive companies that print money could do something as unthinkable as pay for a support contract!
Yes. It benefits them to have ubiquitous tools supported on their system. The vendors should put in the work to make that possible.
I don’t maintain any tools as popular as git or you’d know me by name, but darned if I’m going to put in more than about 2 minutes per year supporting non-Unix.
(This said as someone who was once paid to improve Ansible’s AIX support for an employer. Life’s too short to do that nonsense for free.)
As you're someone very familiar with Ansible, what are your thoughts on it in regards to IBM's imminent complete absorption of RedHat? I can't imagine Ansible, or any other RedHat product, doing well with that.
I wouldn’t say I’m very familiar. I don’t use it extensively anymore, and not at all at work. But in general, I can’t imagine a way in which IBM’s own corporate culture could contribute positively to any FOSS projects if they removed the RedHat veneer. Not saying it’s impossible, just that my imagination is more limited than the idea requires.
IBM has been, and still is, a big contributor to a bunch of Eclipse projects, as their own tools build on those. The people there were both really skilled, friendly and professional. Different divisions and departments can have huge cultural differences and priorities, obviously, but “IBM” doesn’t automatically mean bad for OSS projects.
I'm sure some of RedHat stuff will end up in the Apache Foundation once IBM realizes it has no interest in them.
There isn't even a Nonstop port of GCC yet. Today, Nonstop is big-endian x86-64, so tacking this onto the existing backend is going to be interesting.
That platform doesn’t support GCC either.
Isn’t that’s what’s happening? The post says they’re moving forward.
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On the other hand: why should the entire open-source world screech to a halt just because some new development is incompatible with the ecosystem of a proprietary niche system developed by a billion-dollar freeloader?
HPE NonStop doesn't need to do anything with Rust, and nobody is forcing them to. They have voluntarily chosen to use an obscure proprietary toolchain instead of contributing to GCC or LLVM like everyone else: they could have gotten Rust support for free, but they believed staying proprietary was more important.
Then they chose to make a third-party project (Git) a crucial part of that ecosystem, without contributing time and effort into maintaining it. It's open source, so this is perfectly fine to do. On the other hand, it also means they don't get a say in how the project is developed, and what direction it will take in the future. But hey, they believed saving a few bucks was more important.
And now it has blown up in their face, and they are trying to control the direction the third-party project is heading by playing the "mission-critical infrastructure" card and claiming that the needs of their handful of users is more important than the millions of non-HPE users.
Right now there are three options available to HPE NonStop users:
1. Fork git. Don't like the direction it is heading? Then just do it yourself. Cheapest option short-term, but it of course requires investing serious developer effort long-term to stay up-to-date, rather than just sending the occasional patch upstream.
2. Port GCC / LLVM. That's usually the direction obscure platforms go. You bite the bullet once, but get to reap the benefits afterwards. From the perspective of the open-source community, if your platform doesn't have GCC support it might as well not exist. If you want to keep freeloading off of it, it's best to stop fighting this part. However, it requires investing developer effort - especially when you want to maintain a proprietary fork due to Business Reasons rather than upstreaming your changes like everyone else.
3. Write your own proprietary snowflake Rust compiler. You get to keep full control, but it'll require a significant developer effort. And you have to "muck around" with Rust, of course.
HPE NonStop and its ecosystem can do whatever it wants, but it doesn't get to make demands just because their myopic short-term business vision suddenly leaves them having to spend effort on maintaining it. This time it is caused by Git adopting Rust, but it will happen again. Next week it'll be something like libxml or openssl or ssh or who-knows-what. Either accept that breakage is inevitable when depending on third-party components, or invest time into staying compatible with the ecosystem.
At this point maybe it's time to let them solve the problem they've created for themselves by insisting on a closed C compiler in 2025.
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>> insisting on a closed C compiler in 2025.
> Everything should use one compiler, one run-time and one package manager.
If you think that calling out closed C compilers is somehow an argument for a single toolchain for all things, I doubt there's anything I can do to help educate you about why this isn't the case. If you do understand and are choosing to purposely misinterpret what I said, there are a lot of much stronger arguments you could make to support your point than that.
Even ignoring all of that, there's a much larger point that you've kind of glossed over here by:
> The shitheads who insist on using alternative compilers and platforms don't deserve tools
There's frequently discussion around the the expectations between open source project maintainers and users, and in the same way that users are under no obligation to provide compensation for projects they use, projects don't have any obligations to provide support indefinitely for any arbitrary set of circumstances, even if they happen to for a while. Maintainers sometimes will make decisions weighing tradeoffs between supporting a minority of users or making a technical change they feel will help them maintain the project better in the long-term differently than the users will. It's totally valid to criticize those decisions on technical grounds, but it's worth recognizing that these types of choices are inevitable, and there's nothing specific about C or Rust that will change that in the long run. Even with a single programming language within a single platform, the choice of what features to implement or not implement could make or break whether a tool works for someone's specific use case. At the end of the day, there's a finite amount of work people spend on a given project, and there needs to be a decision about what to spend it on.
For various libs, you provide a way to build without it. If it's not auto-detected, or explicitly disabled via the configure command line, then don't try to use it. Then whatever depends on it just doesn't work. If for some insane reason git integrates XML and uses libxml for some feature, let it build without the feature for someone who doesn't want to provide libxml.
> At the end of the day, there's a finite amount of work people spend on a given project
Integrating Rust shows you have too much time on your hands; the people who are affected by that, not necessarily so.
> Integrating Rust shows you have too much time on your hands; the people who are affected by that, not necessarily so.
As cited elsewhere in the this thread, the person making this proposal on the mailing list has been involved in significant contributions to git in the past, so I'd be inclined to trust their judgment about whether it's a worthwhile use of their time in the absence of evidence to the contrary. If you have something that would indicate this proposal was made in bad faith, I'd certainly be interested to see it, but otherwise, I don't see how you can make this claim other than as your own subjective opinion. That's fine, but I can't say I'm shocked that the people actually making the decisions on how to maintain git don't find it convincing.
Weighted by user count for a developer tool like Git, Rust is a more portable language than the combination of C and bash currently in use.
Maybe they can resurrect the C backend for LLVM and run that through their proprietary compilers?
It's probably not straightforward but the users of NonStop hardware have a lot of money so I'm sure they could find a way.
Rust has an experimental C backend of its own as part of rustc_codegen_clr https://github.com/FractalFir/rustc_codegen_clr . Would probably work better than trying to transpile C from general LLVM IR.
Some people have demonstrated portability using the WASM target, translating that to C89 via w2c2, and then compiling _that_ for the final target.
Given that the maintainer previously said they had tried to pay to get GCC and LLVM ported multiple times, all of which failed, money doesn’t seem to have helped.
Surely the question is how much they tried to pay? Clearly the answer is "not enough".
I mean at one point I had LLVM targeting Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii so I'm sure it's possible, it just needs some imagination and elbow grease :)
> 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.
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...
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.
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?
> 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.
Sure, but let's not pretend that doesn't kill diversity and entrench a few big players.
The alternative is killing diversity of programming languages, so it's hard to win either way.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why should free software projects bend over backwards to support obscure proprietary platforms? Sounds absurd to me
Won't someome think of the financial sector
Reminds me of a conversation about TLS and how a certain bank wanted to insert a backdoor into all of TLS for their convenience.
Sucks to be that platform?
Seriously, I guess they just have to live without git if they're not willing to take on support for its tool chain. Nobody cares about NonStop but the very small number of people who use it... who are, by the way, very well capable of paying for it.
I strongly agree. I read some of the counter arguments, like this will make it too hard for NonStop devs to use git, and maybe make them not use it at all. Those don’t resonate with me at all. So what? What value does them using git provide to the git developers? I couldn’t care less if NonStop devs can use my own software at all. And since they’re exclusively at giant, well-financed corporations, they can crack open that wallet and pay someone to do the hard work if it means than much to them.
"You have to backport security fixes for your own tiny platform because your build environment doesn't support our codebase or make your build environment support our codebase" seems like a 100% reasonable stance to me
> your build environment doesn't support our codebase
If that is due to the build environment deviating from the standard, then I agree with you. However, when its due to the codebase deviating from the standard, then why blame the build environment developers for expecting codebases to adhere to standards. That's the whole point of standards.
Is there a standard that all software must be developed in ANSI C that I missed, or something? The git developers are saying - we want to use Rust because we think it will save us development effort. NonStop people are saying we can't run this on our platform. It seems to me someone at git made the calculus: the amount that NonStop is contributing is less than what we save going to Rust. Unless NonStop has a support contract with git developers that they would be violating, it seems to me the NonStop people want to have their cake and eat it too.
According to git docs they seem to try to make a best effort to stick to POSIX but without any strong guarantees, which this change seems to be entirely in line with: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingG...
An important point of using C is to write software that adheres to a decades old very widespread standard. Of course developers are free to not do that, but any tiny bit of Rust in the core or even in popular optional code amounts to the same as not using C at all, i.e. only using Rust, as far as portability is concerned.
If your codebase used to conform to a standard and the build environment relies on that standard, and now the your codebase doesn't anymore, then its not the build environment that deviates from the standard, its the codebase that brakes it.
Had you been under the impression that any of these niche platforms conform to any common standard other than their own?
Because they don’t. For instance, if they were fully POSIX compliant, they’d probably already have LLVM.
I expect them to conform to the C standard or to deal with the deviation. I don't think POSIX compliance is of much use on an embedded target.
I’m sold.
How is this git's concern?
They enjoy being portable and like things to stay that way so when they introduce a new toolchain dependency which will make it harder for some people to compile git, they point it out in their change log?
I don't think "NonStop" is a good gauge of portability.
But, I wasn't arguing against noting changes in a changelog, I'm arguing against putting portability to abstruse platforms before quality.
I don’t think staying portable means you have to do concession on quality. That merely limit your ability to introduce less portable dependancies.
But even then Git doesn’t mind losing some plateformes when they want to move forward on something.
Git's main concern should, of course, be getting Rust in, in some shape or form.
I am curious, does anyone know what is the use case that mandates the use of git on NonStop? Do people actually commit code from this platform? Seems wild.
Nonstop is still supported? :o