Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] [tcg] Idea on refactoring target code generation loop (gen_intermediate_code)

[Peter Maydell]

On 13 March 2016 at 13:16, Lluís Vilanova <address@hidden> wrote:
> Peter Maydell writes:
>> I would be more interested in a proposal to move parts of QEMU
>> to Rust, or just about anything else except C++...
>
> QEMU is pretty low-level, so I'm not sure other languages will fit the bill as
> good, and for the parts relevant to QEMU you have just as much control of
> low-level details as with C (having a very close syntax also helps
> transition).
>
> But I'm curious, what'd be the advantage of rust? Cross-language
> bindings are usually expensive, and require some duplication for
> defining structures across them (maybe it's not the case for rust).

It's a systems programming language that's not insanely huge
and designed by continuous accretion of features, that's all.
(More positively, it has the usual nice features of newer languages
such as not letting you write code that's exploitable by a
malicious guest via buffer overflows.) But I'm not so much
trying to advocate for Rust (which I have not investigated at all)
as expressing an opinion that if we move away from C I'd rather
it to be a language that's nicer than C rather than one that's
uglier and larger and still retains all of C's flaws.

thanks
-- PMM