Open source composition of Edition 3

[kennystrawnmusic]

Progress on the third edition is likely to go much faster if everyone is able to contribute. Although I’ve heard that work on the third edition is indeed in progress, there’s so far nothing visible (yet) — a “work-in-progress” branch of the repository where pre-release contribution to the third edition would be possible would at least get more contributors on board, and the more possible contributors, the faster the development of the third edition of the book would go.

[phil-opp]

Thanks for the suggestion and for offering to help!

Right now, the main blocker is that I'm still not satisfied with the new build system. In its current state, we wouldn't be able to use the default cargo build/cargo test/cargo run commands anymore and instead use alias commands (e.g. cargo kbuild) to pass the --target and -Zbuild-std arguments. Another drawback is that we would not be able to use the upcoming artifact dependencies feature of cargo.

The best solution for this is to support more .cargo/config settings in Cargo.toml files too, as I proposed on the internals forum. In order to support cargo build etc. with our new build system, we would need to set the following options in our Cargo.toml:

• build.target
  • Landed in Expose build.target .cargo/config setting as packages.target in Cargo.toml rust-lang/cargo#9030
  • needs to be fixed: The new per-package-target feature does not work with -Zbuild-std rust-lang/cargo#9451
• unstable.build-std
• unstable.build-std-features
• target.runner

I know that implementing these in cargo isn't an easy task, but it would help very much in bringing the third edition forward.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Submitted rust-lang/cargo#10084 as a fix for the showstopper that you mention — rearranges some code around so that the -Zbuild-std check waits until after generate_targets() is already run. Although rustfmt fails on it, builds on all platforms are successful. Hopefully this solves the problem.

[phil-opp]

Thanks a lot for looking into this!

[kennystrawnmusic]

I would make the point that target.runner isn’t as critical as build-std in Cargo.toml because it can already be set in .vscode/settings.json which allows you to just click the “Run” button from VS Code and open it in QEMU that way. That is, of course, after installing the Rust plugin for VS Code and going on to rustup component add rust-analyzer-preview as the backend.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Posted a video to my YouTube channel explaining how to get the VS Code option up and running as an alternative just in case the team decides not to move -Zbuild-std into Cargo.toml as Alex Crichton’s skepticism might indicate.

[kennystrawnmusic]

Alright, since I kind of figured out how to design a logger on my own without the need for Edition 3-Post-3, I've decided to publish my own logger as a standalone crate for other kernels to use in the meantime. Should help speed up Post 3 by a lot.

[Lioncat2002]

yo was wondering how long we got till the publishing of edition 3?

[kennystrawnmusic]

yo was wondering how long we got till the publishing of edition 3?

There is an edition-3 repository branch but it hasn’t been updated since January 27 (and I have submitted a few pull requests to that branch myself that have yet to be considered for merging).

[bjorn3]

@phil-opp is still working on a redesign of the bootloader crate: rust-osdev/bootloader#232 This redesign is blocking the 3rd edition.

[kennystrawnmusic]

@phil-opp is still working on a redesign of the bootloader crate: rust-osdev/bootloader#232 This redesign is blocking the 3rd edition.

So that new version of the bootloader has been released; now what? Still no commits to the edition-3 branch in 11 months.