Re: Planned obsolescence ? (*BSD, Rust)

> OpenBSD has the express goal of supporting ancient hardware.

As has NetBSD for that matter:
"*Continuing stable support * for a wide range of "legacy" hardware and 
ABIs. There's long-term backwards compatibility to even the earliest 
NetBSD releases without compromising on feature like 64-bit time. We 
intend to keep these systems running long after Year 2038. "[1]

That said, 20 year old hardware that is still in-use today by a 
reasonably large amount of users isn't something I'd consider ancient or 
retro.

> There is disagreement between OpenBSD's view on Rust's cost/benefit 
> with a stable, reviewed and maintained C codebase and most of the rest 
> of the industry, (and within apt) -- but again, that's not important here.

It's not limited to OpenBSD to be sceptic about Rust implementations. 
For one, Linus Torvalds has recently expressed his frustration on the 
Linux kernel mailing list with the borked rust format checking which may 
result in unnecessary merge conflicts. [2][3]

Also, let's not forget that while Rust is memory safe per default, it 
isn't a bug-free paradise. You can still have logic bugs. Of which there 
was one recently in the Rust implementation of coreutils, specifically 
'"date -r file" returns a wrong date'[4], which directly caused 
unattended upgrades to break in Ubuntu 25.10 [5] (or any other program 
that relied on a date check of a file for that matter). It goes to show 
that a rewrite introduces a potential for new bugs that are unrelated to 
the original implementation, even if that rewrite happens to be in Rust.

It feels like the movement to introduce Rust everywhere is more because 
Rust has become such a buzzword that everyone must use it now and less 
because of the capabilities of Rust. Not to throw shade, but if the only 
benefit is memory safety you might as well do a rewrite in any other 
memory safe language that provides I/O access (e.g. Haskell) instead.

Cheers, JD

[1]: https://www.netbsd.org/about/
[2]: 
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgO7S_FZUSBbngG5vtejWOpzDfTTBkVvP3_yjJmFddbzA@mail.gmail.com/
[3]: https://news.itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-criticizes-drm-merge/
[4]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2127970
[5]: 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unattended-upgrades/+bug/2129660