@cjd @david @TheMadPirate @phnt @ins0mniak

> I take it you have your own distro (?)

I just use CRUX almost everywhere (I have a couple of Slackware systems kicking around). It is mostly source-based, and it's small enough that you can roll your own rootfs pretty easily. Anyone running a source-based distro is a canary in the coal mine.

There was, years ago, an expectation that a coder understood his OS; at some point sysadmins stopped being able to code and this was untenable so now it's called "devops".

> There's an age-old struggle between devs and distro packagers.

I'm familiar. If I were extremely happy with how distro packagers operate, I wouldn't be using a distro where packages are just tarballs.

You run into shit like "$package won't build without Boost $newversion and $otherlib $someversion. But version $someversion of $otherlib won't build without Boost $oldversion." And the most effective way to figure out what you need to do is to find the release date of the package (and a distressing number of projects cover the front page with marketing material and make it hard to find the source code), find out what Ubuntu was doing that day, and then try those versions of the dependencies. These people have not written their software for Unix or even for Linux, they have written it for Ubuntu version $x and no sooner or later: it is so brittle that if someone working on one of those projects says anything about "portability", it's hard not to laugh. It's not even portable to the same OS/arch from six months ago, and six months from now it won't build any more.

> IMO Rust doesn't really replace Java

I mean that I can see it occupying an analogous niche. There are Java programmers, there will be Java programmers for a long time, there are a few projects that are written in Java that end up being relevant even to people that avoid Java, like I've had to work with ElasticSearch and neo4j and Solr, and whatever you're working on, you'll occasionally bump into Java. For the duration of the career of anyone in the industry today, specializing in Java is possible. I think it's possible that Rust gets to that level; I don't think it's the likely case. C++ isn't going anywhere.

The last time I had to update rustc, I had to uninstall rustc: it wouldn't build with an older version of itself *present* on the system, because it couldn't cope with how cargo worked. (These are, again, releases, not snapshots.) Movefastbreakthings was abandoned even by webshits: stability precedes adoption.

> Rust more replaces C++ than anything IMO.

Yeah, for platforms where it runs, at any rate. I wouldn't hate for a thing to replace C++; I never liked C++. On the other hand, I think the best replacement for C++ is C. Your mileage may vary.