A few months ago I spent some time to learn some basic Rust, I was interested in getting an informed view of the language, specifically about the safety and concurrency idioms as well as its compatibility with the C ABI and automatic memory management while being non GCed. I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the tooling, cargo is a breeze and crates.io is a wonderful resource. More recently though I’ve been investing time to actually understand the memory ownership model and how it plays with channels/concurrency. I must say that what these guys have achieved is really clever with a language that once you get the grasp of things feels actually really nice to use.

For a long while now I’ve been worried that the GNOME project would struggle to grow its contribution and stay attractive if it stuck to C in the long run (i.e. next 10-20 years). GObject hasn’t really caught on beyond the GNOME ecosystem. So we’re basically maintaining a whole low level framework, and we have to come up with something by ourselves everytime a new technology comes in (i.e. JSON, REST…). Given our limited resources, I’ve been wondering if there are better alternatives.

For people wanting to contribute to the core libraries consumed by the ecosystem, the only options are C and Vala. Vala has been a great tool for prototyping, I love it myself, but debugging it is a nightmare, it’s filled with security issues and even if we fixed those really difficult problems, we’d be maintaining our own language on top of everything else. I would like to see us maintaining less stuff other than a desktop and the application development framework, not more.

I trully believe Rust gives us a way out of this situation, with certain nice side benefits, Rust really ticks most boxes: C ABI compatibility, safety, modern syntax, vibrant community, ever growing set of libraries and tools and a culturally aligned organization backing it: Mozilla. So when Federico made the brave step of start using it in one of our libraries I was very encouraged by the notion that this might actually happen. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see positive reactions to his effort by many core developers on twitter.

Now, 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.

Ultimately though, there are many challenges, achieving full GObject compatibility can be difficult, we would need to be able to consume GI bindings from Rust and eventually emit GI bindings too, and in the end it would be up to the core of the community to lead an effort like this so there needs to be consensus too. It is quite a bit of work, but I believe it is worth considering as it might give us back a lot resources to focus on other stuff.

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.