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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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At the cost of sounding naive and stupid, wouldn't it be possible to improve compilers to not spew out unsafe executables? Maybe as a compile time option so people have time to correct the source.
Modern C compilers have a lot of features you can use to check for example for memory errors. Rusts borrow-checker is much stricter as it's designed to be part of the language, but for low-level code like the Linux kernel you'll end up having to use Rust's unsafe feature on a lot of code to do things from talking to actual hardware to just implementing certain data structures and then Rust is about as good as C.
Compilers follow specs and in some cases you can have undefined behavior. You can and should use compiler flags but should complement that with good programming practices (e.g. TDD) and other tools in your pipeline (such as valgrind).
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I admit I'm biased towards C-languages out of sheer personal preference and limited exposure to Rust but I am wondering, are there any major technical barriers to Rust replacing these languages in it's current form anymore?
I know there has been a lot of movement towards supporting Rust in the last 6 years since I've become aware of it, but I also get flashbacks from the the early 00's when I would hear about how Java was destined to replace C++, and the early 2010's when Python was destined to replace everything only to realize that the hype fundamentally misunderstood the use case limitations of the various languages.
Its mainly a matter of stabilizing existing features in the language - there are rust modules in the linux kernel as of 6.1 but they have to be compiled with the nightly compiler.
Rust is a very slow moving , get it right the first time esque, project. Important and relatively fundamental stuff is currently and has been useable and 99% unchanging for years but hasnt been included in the mainline compiler.
Also certain libraries would be fantastic to have integrated into the standard library, like tokio, anyhow, thiserror, crossbeam, rayon, and serde. If that ever happens though itll be in like a decade.
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3min 30s, sample for context
If you keep watching for 10 minutes, it's an interesting discussion. Too bad they had to cut it short due to time.