cbmuser

> Huh. Is this arch supported by LLVM/Rust?

Yes.

> It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.

No, that was just the wish expressed by one of the APT maintainers. No actual decision has been made yet.

> Actually Alpine had support for LoongArch64 well before Debian.

Nah, we added the loong64 in Debian already in 2023:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/08/msg00...

It was just promoted to being a release architecture.

> What I've always found off-putting about the Debian packaging system is that the source lives with the packaging.

Many packages have stopped shipping the whole source and just keep the debian directory in Git.

Notable examples are

- gcc-*

- openjdk-*

- llvm-toolchain-*

and many more.

You can buy LoongArch hardware on AliExpress, for example.

»It could be but the US and EU have so far been unable to build commercial fission reactors without going 2x+ over budget in time and money.«

The EU also forgot how to build airports and train stations on budget and on time.

Should we stop building airports and train stations?

As for nuclear power plants: Germany and France built most of their reactors on budget and on time.

Wind and solar existed in the 70s as well.

Plus, Germany invested 500 billion Euros in its energy transition and is STILL heavily dependent on coal.

»Your citation comes from an organization with pro nuclear bias.«

Go and throw all your money into renewables stocks and ETFs if you’re so convinced.

I bet you’re not doing that because you realize that the industry isn’t doing well and it’s nuclear power nowadays where all the money goes.

»Enough renewables are deployed annually to replace the global nuclear fission fleet, year after year, even when accounting for capacity factor derating (to make a like for like comparison).«

Wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants and never will.

Heck, Germany tried that on the small island of Pellworm and failed and yet some people think this will work out for the whole country.

It does not work.

Look at Electricity Maps and realize that France is the only large industrial country where electricity generation is permanently carbon-free and cheap.

https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

Or just build out nuclear like France and pay just 20 Cents per kWh.

https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

It sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practice.

Just compare Germany to France.

We’re trying that in Germany while we’re still heavily dependent on coal while our electricity prices are twice as much compared to France.

I’m sorry, but wind and solar may be cheap, but they don’t provide cheap electricity 24/7.

Yes, that is being worked on.

They’re not going to fall to the wayside, we’re eventually getting Rust support on these.

It’s just a bit annoying that Rust proponents are being so pushy in some cases as if Rust was the solution to everything.

Nobody wants to play games on Linux given the small userbase compared to Windows. Yet people work on it.

You could make this argument for so many usecases but apparently people just enjoy bashing retrocomputing here.

> Who is still using these machines? Genuine question, not trolling.

Well, there are so many things were you could argue about the relevance of a userbase.

If the size of a userbase would be the only argument, Valve could just drop support for the Linux userbase which is just 2-3% of their overall userbase.

I assume it was a management decision to adopt Rust in APT similar to the decision to switch to the Rust version of coreutils.

> In an ideal world, the people who care about niche systems step up to help Rust target those systems.

I’m actually the person who added the m68k target to the Rust compiler and was also one of the driving forces of getting the backend into LLVM.

Generally speaking, getting a new backend into the Rust compiler is not trivial as it depends on LLVM support at the moment which is why asking someone to just do it is a bit arrogant.

Luckily, both rustc_codegen_gcc and gccrs are being worked on, so this problem will be resolved in the future.

The electricity mix in France is still way cleaner than in California:

- France: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/5y/yearly

- California: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/5y/year...

And their kWh costs less than 20 Cents in the standard plan:

- https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...

They even offer flex prices going down as low as 12,32 Cents/kWh.

Nuclear power rules.

It's not planned for i386 to avoid breaking existing i386 binaries of which there are a lot of them.

»Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug – also known as the Unix Epochalypse – by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release.«

That's inaccurate. We actually switched over all 32-bit ports except i386 because we wanted to keep compatibility for this architecture with existing binaries.

All other 32-bit ports use time64_t, even m68k ;-). I did the switch for m68k, powerpc, sh4 and partially hppa.

It’s probably more related to the fact that EV subsidies were cut in Germany at the end of last year when the government ran out of money.

You’re only getting a tax discount with BEV, but no purchase discounts financed from taxes.

But Cellophane is already used for food packaging.

Have you ever heard of Cellophane?

No one was ever harmed by incorporating plastics. And id your body can’t make any use if it, it will leave your body through the digestive system.

»We like plastic because it is lightweight and not biodegradable.«

Depends on the type of plastic used.

Cellophane is a plant-derived plastic that can be used for packaging and it’s biodegradable.

They still need conventional power plants for backup which will make the life-cycle electricity emissions of the whole system much dirtier.

The problem is simply that managers at Google think that designs have to change all the time.

The idea that a design is perfect does not exist at Google.

»32-bit x86 is extremely not called “x32”; this is what Linux used to call its x86 ILP324 variant before it was removed.«

x32 support has not been removed from the Linux kernel. In fact, we‘re still maintaining Debian for x32 in Debian Ports.

Thanks for the update. I think one important issue that also needs to be resolved is adding the GCC git tree as a subproject in Rust's git tree so that in the end, it will be possible to build a Rust compiler with a rustc_codegen_gcc backend without having to resort to external repositories.