I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all, rather I think a lot of people are willfully misrepresenting GP’s point.
Rust-to-rust code should be able to be dynamically linked with an ABI that has better safety guarantees than the C ABI. That’s the point. You can’t even express an Option<T> via the C ABI, let alone the myriad of other things rust has that are put together to make it a safe language.
You can look to Swift for prior art on how this can be done: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/
It would be very hard to accomplish. Apple was extremely motivated to make Swift have a resilient/stable ABI, because they wanted to author system frameworks in swift and have third parties use them in swift code (including globally updating said frameworks without any apps needing to recompile.) They wanted these frameworks to feel like idiomatic swift code too, not just be a bunch of pointers and manual allocation. There’s a good argument that (1) Rust doesn’t consider this an important enough feature and (2) they don’t have enough resources to accomplish it even if they did. But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.
> I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all
Thank you :-)
> It would be very hard to accomplish.
Yeah it's a super hard problem especially when you provide safety using the type system!
The work the Swift team did here is hella impressive.
> But if you could wave a magic wand and make it “done”, it would be huge for rust adoption.
Yeah!