Re: [gnu-soc] GNU GSOC 2023 application

[Jose E. Marchesi]

Hi Samuel.

I added the Hurd idea to the page.  Thank you very much.

As a side note, have you heard of the GCC Rust front-end (under
development) that has been recently added to GCC?  It may be relevant to
the Hurd.

> Hello Jose,
>
> - GNU Hurd
> - The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It
>   is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to
>   implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and
>   other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar
>   kernels (such as Linux).
> - https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
> - Porting Rust to GNU/Hurd
>
> - The goal of this project is to make the Rust language
> (https://www.rust-lang.org/) available on GNU/Hurd.
>
> The Rust language is being used more and more widely, and notably in
> rather fundamental libraries such as librsvg or python-cryptography. It
> is thus more and more pressing for GNU/Hurd to have a compiler for Rust.
>
> The Rust compiler itself is quite portable, but its runtime library,
> libstd, needs to be ported to the GNU/Hurd system. This essentially
> consists in telling Rust how the standard C library functions can be
> called.
>
> And example of the main part of such port can be seen for the VxWorks
> port:
> https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/blob/master/src/vxworks/mod.rs
>
> The bulk of such a file can be mostly generated from the libc C
> headers thanks to the bindgen tool, it then needs to be cleaned up and
> integrated into the Rust build infrastructure, some preliminary work had
> already been investigated in that part.
>
> A cross-bootstrap from Linux will then need to be achieved to build
> rustc and cargo, and then it will be self-hosted on GNU/Hurd.
>
> - A good level of C programming will be welcome to understand the
> questions of ABI and the libc C functions being bound.
>
> Knowing the Rust language is not required: it can be learnt along the
> way, this can be a good occasion.
>
> - bug-hurd@gnu.org
> - https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/community/gsoc/project_ideas/rust/
> https://www.rust-lang.org/
> https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-and-run.html
>
> Samuel