@RL_Dane@passthejoe I have a now 24 year old Thinkpad A22m that's I still update and keep working, especially old ibm thinkpads are just resilient beasts
@RL_Dane@passthejoe P3-800, with a rage mobility M (essentially the rage 128), so it even has basic 3d acceleration. I ran SuSE on it wayyy back in the day (from boxed copies) but I've been 100% gentoo on everything for probably about 15ish years now.
I love Gentoo for supporting old architectures, but the compilation time can't be fun on that box. I'd imagine compiling #rustlang programs would be darn near impossible.
@RL_Dane@passthejoe I use a cross-compile cluster in my house so even my raspberry pi's (which also run gentoo) and older pc's compile in a flash as they all assist each other over the network. I avoid rust for the most part, I get it's uses but in practice 99% of what I've seen implemented in the wild runs as "unsafe" for performance reasons and the rest is simply too slow/incompatible for embedded use. I'm BIG on memory/cpu reduction and rust tends to push things the other way...
@raptor85 as an embedded Rust developer: this is wildly inaccurate. You need unsafe for a few building blocks like register access, but most code is perfectly fine performance wise without unsafe.
@dngrs I would definitely argue that most rust code is definitely NOT fine performance wise (almost 50% overhead hit on alloc/dealloc operations!), and the reason it tends to feel fine is that the hardware it's being run on is overbuilt enough to account for it on even simple code. Sure, you can throw an A76 with a few gigs of ram at the problem reasonably cheap now...or I can write the same thing closer to the metal and run the exact same functionality on an attiny with a few kb..
@RL_Dane@passthejoe it was fun to set up, when i bought the house i fished cat6 EVERYWHERE so I've got computers, raspberry pi's and other lightweight boards basically controlling everything in the house kinda hidden EVERYWHERE, lol, for the computers and pi's that run linux since they're all on network and I've set them all up for the distcc cluster I can manage them all from my main desktop, the ones on my tv screens/projector are pi 4's
@RL_Dane rustc has gotten a lot faster over time, also cross compiling Rust is rather trivial. There's also cargo binstall (yes, with a b) for prebuilt packages.
@RL_Dane@passthejoe while I mostly keep it around for just the fun of it it does serve some purpose still, as it has a physical serial port and I have the dock with a parallel port/etc it's excellent as an easy quick interface for older hardware/testing. It's still quite a useful machine, even at 512MB of ram (I upgraded it long, long ago, stock had 64MB standard), but most programs still run ok on that, can even play UT99/Quake 3 quite well.
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