Re: [TECH TOPIC] Implementing malloc

On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 8:18 PM H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> In case it was not obvious, my comment was meant to be ironic (reductio ad absurdum).

Ok, I appreciate the clarification and that you consider it the right call then.

> In fact, I'm surprised and worried to hear how recent this was. This underscores my main concern with Rust, which is that it seems to have *very* different stability criteria than the C code, where we are not allowed to require anything that hasn't been in gcc for 5-10 years, after which the clang people discover they never implemented it and so they ask for another 5+ years of keeping the old-syle or fallback code.

Hmm... What is the concern? If it is about the window of supported
compilers, the current policy is to follow Debian Stable's version as
the minimum.

  https://rust-for-linux.com/rust-version-policy#minimum-upgrade-policy

It was openly discussed and finally decided in the Maintainers Summit.

As things mature and we get the improvements we want, we may want to
extend it to two Debian Stables etc.

But please note that, regarding allocators, we could have moved
earlier. As I mentioned, we waited as long as we could to see if
upstream could give us what we needed. It didn't happen, so we
pivoted, but we could have done it earlier.

Cheers,
Miguel