Of course Phoronix does not report the important follow up message in the thread:
Rust is already a hard requirement on all Debian release architectures and ports except for alpha, hppa, m68k, and sh4 (which do not provide sqv).
not be held back by trying to shoehorn modern software on retro computing devices.
So I admit that I am just a user and have basically no idea what goes on behind the scenes in development, but for me, shoehorning stuff into retro devices is kind of a defining feature of Linux. It runs on just about everything, full stop. I suppose that can be a blessing and a curse, but it does make me a little sad especially in the context of this rust fever where everyone seems to think that this one thing will magically solve all the problems. Seems a bit short-sighted to me. Also because I thought I’d move to Debian since Ubuntu has been forcing snaps onto me…
Rust is a coding language that requires its own toolkit when building binaries with it (just as gcc is required for everything written in C). Rust of course won’t magically fix every issue and changing the tooling won’t be user-facing but this is for developers to make their job easier. If they will be able to fix stuff faster then it’s a win for users as well.
Well Linux and a lot of other distros still work on those devices. And even apt/debian will work there if someone ports rust to that architecture. That is the good thing about FOSS. Not that everything always works everywhere, but if someone cares enough they can make it happen.
