Michael Murphy

System76 engineer and Pop!_OS developer

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  • 9 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 16th, 2020

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  • There’s several things that make Rust more ideal for writing software that makes efficient use of resources than C or C++.

    One of these is how cumbersome it is to use tagged unions in C/C++. They’re integrated as a first class citizen in Rust in the form of enums, and both the standard library and all Rust projects as a whole utilize them extensively. An example would be the Cow<'a, T> type. The compiler also has some clever tricks like zero-sized types which can reduce the size of types which contain them.

    On the surface, the borrowing and ownership model is useful for guaranteeing memory safety. Yet if you take that a step further, it’s the perfect tool for finely optimizing resource usage with confidence. In comparison, defensive programming practices are the norm in C and C++ because resource management is risky. So applications written in Rust are more likely to be better optimized.


  • It’s already packaged on multiple distributions, albeit in an unofficial capacity. If you are on Pop!_OS, you can install the cosmic-session package today, then enable Wayland in the gdm3 config. We have an apt-manage tool which you can use to add development branches. A popdev branch is created for each branch on GitHub pushed by a team member. Which can be useful to quickly add a branch to validate a fix by a developer.




  • NVIDIA graphics is already well supported by cosmic-comp for those that want to give it a go on Pop!_OS. I’m typing from a laptop with NVIDIA hybrid graphics in the discrete graphics mode. Hybrid and integrated graphics modes are also working well. In addition to the iced library, slint is already a decent alternative to QML.