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A comment on Ask HN: What is preventing rust from replacing c/c++?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What is preventing rust from replacing c/c++? by flukus on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @06:44AM (#14795547)
> While your use cases are definitely valid for you, this is not a Rust issue, but something that's 100% decided by your distro. They decide if, when and how they integrate Rust into it.

It's a rust issue because it's up to the rust compiler to generate ABI compatible binaries, at the moment there is no ABI so there isn't much distros can do. It seems they have no intention of adding one any time soon: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/600

This is why system libraries are nearly always in c and not c++. The ones that aren't (Qt) have a long history of broken language bindings.

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Re:Ask HN: What is preventing rust from replacing c/c++? by jjpe on Sunday July 23, 2017 @04:54AM (#14831449)
This is not as much as a problem as you believe. Rust is perfectly capable of making objects that have a C API and ABI precisely for this reason, and the most popular distros only work with supported compile targets anyway. That said, a distro like Debian might indeed encounter some issues at this time for the less prominent platforms eg MIPS or PowerPC based chips. That shouldn't prevent Debian from including Rust altogether though, they merely should exclude it on those less or even unsupported platforms.
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