Should GNOME Begin Replacing More C Code With Rust?

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 31 October 2016 at 04:05 PM EDT. 90 Comments
GNOME
There's talk of potentially using more Rust code within the GNOME desktop environment as opposed to C/Vala code.

GNOME developer Federico Mena-Quintero has been working on porting parts of librsvg to Rust as a first bit of Rust code for GNOME. LibRSVG is the SVG rendering library using Cairo written for GNOME.

Well known GNOME developer Alberto Ruiz has now written his thoughts on GNOME and Rust. He wrote, "imagine for a moment, that we decide to somewhat embrace Rust in our libraries, and we start adopting it in places like GTK+. Suddenly we have the opportunity to engage in the growing enthusiasm around Rust, and we have a channel to technologies and tools being built outside of our own community such as WebRenderer, Servo...Additionally, we release ourselves from the burden of maintaining core libraries for everything so we can focus on producing a great desktop and application development story...Please don’t read this as a formal proposal, I think something like that should come, I’m mostly putting my thoughts on this out there and see what the rest of the community thinks."

Aside from not formally being proposed yet to use more Rust in GNOME, there is additionsl work that needs to be done about better GObject compatibility for Rust, etc.

Do you think this is a good idea for GNOME and would help its development community? Share your thoughts about GNOME and Rust by commenting on this article in the forums.
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