Re: The Case for Rust (in the base system)

This is rather pessimistic though, just because a kernel was initially written in C, means that it won't ever have a chance at another language?

I am pulling this out of my *** but C devs seem to be in decline, what's worse, having no devs or having devs that specialize in other languages?

Still weird that rust was added to a kernel before C++ though, C++ being almost a superset of C would have probably helped with its adoption.

But people still (also) refer to C++ when they wanna talk about memory bugs, as if that problem hasn't been solved by RAII for a decade+.

Yes, in legacy codebases that used C++ as "C with classes" per its original name, memory bugs are still found today, but I'd be really interested to see statistics and comparisons on the matter when compared to a modern C++ codebase.

Again, rust community being more vocal gives the false idea of a thriving developer community but in reality rust is hard to use and I struggle believing people would choose rust to contribute to FOSS kernels if they find developing in C and C++ difficult.


Source: I made it all up, very happy to see myself proven wrong in the future. Can't deny that I am eager to see where this whole situation is going in the times to come.

Fotis
On Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024 at 10:29 AM, lain. <lain@fair.moe> wrote:

> On 2024年09月03日 00:23, the silly Tomek CEDRO claimed to have said:
> 
> > Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical
> > nonsense'.
> > 
> > Community seems to C Rust more as a burden than a benefit
> > 
> > https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/02/rust_for_linux_maintainer_steps_down/
> > 
> > --
> > CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
> 
> 
> Exactly as I predicted.
> Only a matter of time until a massive hype settles, and a sense of
> reality returns again.
> 
> Rust works on Redox, because that OS has been written in Rust from the
> get go.
> Rust does not work on Linux or FreeBSD, because those are written in C.
> It's really that simple!
> 
> "But Unix was written in Assembly, and got rewritten in C!"
> Yes, but C is pretty close to Assembly, and the Unix codebase back then
> was still small, so a rewrite was pretty easy.
> Good luck rewriting the entire Linux kernel to Rust without committing
> suicide though.
> 
> --
> lain.
> PGP public key: https://fair.moe/lain.asc