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

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 8:48 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? by pizza
Parent article: Getting extensions to work with free-threaded Python

So how exactly do you work around known bugs that mis-compile something that then fails at runtime because some optimization went awry?

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When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 10:09 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It depends whether you're using a qualified compiler or not.

If you're using a qualified compiler, and your code meets the compiler's qualification requirements, you notify your compiler vendor, and they will, per your contract with them, supply a bug fix along with the necessary paperwork for your certification to update to this new compiler. That paperwork is rather arduous, but confirms that (a) the bug was in the compiler's handling of a qualified construct, (b) that this bug fix resolves that, and (c) that this bug fix does not break the compiler's handling of other qualified constructs.

If you're not using a qualified compiler, then you change the source code or build options, until the output is what you want, without the miscompilation.

Note that because this is the safety critical world, you must audit the system for compliance with the standards; a qualified compiler allows you to audit in the source code world, any other compiler requires you to audit the binary output.