Also turning on optimizations in rust and the linker helped a lot but were not enough in the end.
I wonder if you have any opinions on how useful higher-kinded types (HKTs), one of the most requested features for Rust, would have been in implementing this OS. For example the absence of HKTs means that Rust can't have smooth and general handling of monads that is comparable to Haskell's. Would Haskell-style monads or Arrows have been helpful?
I believe HKT would have been useful but am not really sure how much HKT would have helped me overall. They would likely have been most useful (if at all) in the VFS/S5FS/VM stages that I was unable to fully get to.
Honestly, I have not used haskell enough to definitively say whether monads/arrows would have been useful.
> having the executable be over 4MB, with such a small
> program such as just a Hello World is kind of nuts
Also, end users might not care that much about binary size, but distribution maintainers do -- they want to fit as much functionality they can within a reasonable-sized iso download. If including a rust program in the base OS means omitting a dozen C programs that would have fit in the same space, that's a hard sell.
I am optimistic that these kinds of issues will be worked out as the language stabilizes and the tools improve.
This really caught me. I have not played around with rust that much but having the executable be over 4MB, with such a small program such as just a Hello World is kind of nuts. I know that they still have lot of compiler optimization, but I just thought that was a very interesting portion of the read.