Oct 14, 2026, 8:11 PM@Lunaphied @mhoye @hipsterelectron @froztbyte i’m confused why a pure-rust bootstrap path matters in practice
- Oct 14, 2026, 8:11 PM
Replies
LunaphiedLunaphied@provably.onlineOct 15, 2026, 7:15 AM@hipsterelectron @froztbyte @jyn @mhoye it matters because I thought it was cute. But more practically I think a true systems language should be able to bootstrap itself. Well more specifically I just believe your bootstrap chain in general should not require C++, a language so notoriously hard to compile. Even Rust I think is fundamentally simpler to compile since a lot of the lifetime rules you can just ignore if you simply assume it'll work and don't do fancy optimization.
- LunaphiedLunaphied@provably.onlineOct 15, 2026, 7:15 AM
@hipsterelectron @froztbyte @jyn @mhoye basically, I think Rust should replace C++, or even C, and I think to do that it needs to be like those languages in that it's totally possible to do it with their compiler alone. Otherwise? Yeah I don't think bootstrapping matters at all and people are too concerned about it since we already just assume a C++ compiler is in the bootstrap for most cases and simply adding a Rustc build alongside is fine
- Oct 15, 2026, 7:55 AM
@Lunaphied @hipsterelectron @froztbyte @mhoye i don’t necessarily disagree but i think rust has a lot more urgent problems than its bootstrap chain, like build caching and parallelism