this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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People really afraid of Rust out here.
It literally wasn't about Rust specifically though. Christoph literally said it was about anything that was not C, including assembly, C++, brainfuck, or whatever, entering the kernel. Christoph likes Rust. Christoph (rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
You make it sound like it's a matter of taste rather than a technical one (and I suspect it actually might be just about taste in the end)
Its a little of column A, little of column B type situation.
Yes, some of it is his taste, but that taste is coming from a technical place. Primarily long term maintainability of the project.
I realize what Linus came out and said outlines that no code is entering Christoph's part of the project, but Christoph is playing goalie and needs to make sure that never happens in order to keep everything working correctly for a very long time.
Maybe the DMA module gets rewritten completely in Rust one day, but until then, rust modules interfacing with a C-only component seems to be the best for long-term maintenance.