Re:Writing Network Drivers in Rust [pdf]
by bluejekyll on Thursday November 08, 2018 @07:06PM
(#18411240)
> it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint
I'm not sure if you were implying that it doesn't, but Rust also supports musl:
$> rustup target list | rg musl
aarch64-unknown-linux-musl
arm-unknown-linux-musleabi
arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf
armv5te-unknown-linux-musleabi
armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
i586-unknown-linux-musl
i686-unknown-linux-musl
mips-unknown-linux-musl
mipsel-unknown-linux-musl
powerpc64le-unknown-linux-musl
x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
Re:Writing Network Drivers in Rust [pdf]
by kungtotte on Friday November 09, 2018 @11:33AM
(#18415630)
I apologize if I worded my post weirdly. It was a list of things that make Nim a competitor to Rust, not things that Nim does that Rust doesn't.
There's a fair bit of overlap for obvious reasons: they're two languages suited for the same tasks, after all :)
It has several tunable GCs allowing for great flexibility there, and also supports running with no GC at all. It compiles to C that will compile nearly anywhere C does. It produces smaller binaries, and it can easily link against musl instead of libc for an even lighter footprint. It's also safe like Rust is, and the compiler will help you catch a ton of errors.
That's not to say that it's competitive at this point in time. It's much more unstable as a language due to not reaching 1.0 yet. They only just (August) received any real kind of funding, allowing them to hire on a new developer but it's still just a handful of core devs and some dedicated contributors. The standard library and the community repo (Nimble) can't compare with Rust's and Cargo in terms of package availability and support.