When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? [LWN.net]

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 27, 2025 11:41 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? by Kamilion
Parent article: Getting extensions to work with free-threaded Python

> When *IS* the date of the final sale/delivery of a product in this era? (this is rhetorical, and doesn't require a serious answer, I've got plenty of purchase orders and invoices to reference.)

Generally, it's when the manufacturer ceases selling the device, or delivers the final example if those two dates are not the same.

> And at what point do we get a warranty extension from a vendor's update?

Warranties universally kick in at the time of sale, with a fixed scope and duration, and may or may not be transferable upon resale. Repairs _may_ yield extensions to the general warranty, but it is rare that the extension covers anything other than what was scoped in the repair. But warranties are generally a contractual term that can be altered or waived. Laws/regulations transcend that.

Let's say I have a 3 year warranty on a car; I get a repair done at 2.5 years; that repair has a 1yr warranty. If the repaired part breaks at year 3.1, they have to fix it for free, but if anything else breaks, I have to pay if I want it fixed. Let's also say that my specific car was was manufactured and sold in 2020, and was sold until early 2021. This means the manufacturer is on the hook to supply certain spare parts and perform safety-related recalls at no charge for my specific car until until 2031 (ten years after the final unit was sold, but eleven after I purchased it)

This is an oversimplification but I hope it offers some clarification.

> I respect MISRA as much as the next guy, but I also interact with a lot of code artifacts that are the absolute inverse of mission critical.

If you *shudder* so much thinking about the state of code in automotive, medical, or aviation, consider that those are overwhelmingly superior in quality to everything else in your life. It's quite depressing.

(But I'd also caution you to recognize that not every bit of code in a car, airplane, or medical device has "life or death" safety implications. There are strict redundancy, robustness, and isolation requirements for the latter..)

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When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 2:57 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

> (But I'd also caution you to recognize that not every bit of code in a car, airplane, or medical device has "life or death" safety implications. There are strict redundancy, robustness, and isolation requirements for the latter..)

Indeed, the amount of code that has safety implications in aviation is probably dwarfed by the amount of code that's just there to make the seat-back entertainment system work.

(And no, that's not a problem. The entertainment system is or should be fully air-gapped from the avionics. It's really just an elaborate HTPC-like-thing with a lot of screens and a terrible bespoke UI. If it breaks, oh well, the passengers can't watch movies, and maybe we have to do the safety presentation the old-fashioned way instead of playing the fancy video that marketing told us we're supposed to play for that purpose.)

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 22:13 UTC (Sat) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

Eh, yes, should be. Cost cutting always results in "there's an obviously idiot proof software solution, nothing can go wrong." 🙈 Which might even work well enough absent hostile attacks. In practice, although I don't know all the safety critical domains, I'm afraid it's more like VLANs instead of physically separate networks. And that... probably works, absent malice, which the industries are only learning to think about.