Programming Leftovers
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LWN ☛ An update on gccrs development
One concern that has often been expressed about the Rust language is that there is only one compiler for it. That makes it hard to say what the standard version of the language is and restricts the architectures that can be targeted by Rust code to those that the available compiler supports. Adding a Rust frontend to GCC would do much to address those concerns; at the 2024 GNU Tools Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry gave an update on the state of that work and what its objectives are.
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Rust
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LWN ☛ Coccinelle for Rust
Tathagata Roy has been working to make the Coccinelle tool that is used (among other things) to automate the refactoring of C code work on Rust code as well. Roy gave a presentation at Kangrejos about that work, including the creative approaches necessary to work with Rust's more complicated control flow and syntax.
Roy opened by describing the purpose of Coccinelle within the kernel. Linux's code is huge, and frequently a change to some internal API will need to be reflected across a large number of drivers or other kernel components; Coccinelle allows maintainers to write patches in a special language that can be automatically applied across the entire code base, making it easier to make changes that have a broad impact. This kind of change requires a specialized tool since parsing C source code is not trivial.
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Openwashing
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Simon Willison ☛ The Fair Source Definition
I like that they're establishing a new brand for this and making it clear that it's a separate concept from Open Source. Here's their definition: [...]
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