Context for s*x-havers:
Rust is a recent programming language which includes safety measures to prevent programmers from writing certain types of bugs. Linux is written in C, an old programming language which doesn't have any sort of security features. Linux has many millions of line of C code, and there is a push to transition at least part of the code to Rust to increase the overall security, but many object as there is a lot of friction in integrating the 2 languages and also people don't want to learn a new language to keep doing their job.
Today one of the guys pushing Rust's adoption into Linux has officially given up, citing "too much non-technical nonsense" and pointing to these 3 heated minutes during his talk at a technical conference for Linux developers:
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Rust is evil because it makes low-level coding accessible to non shape rotators
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No real discussion on HN, just https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41387924 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386939.
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let me rile them up
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Maybe his egg hasn't cracked yet
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I like rust but I don't think it really deserves to be in the kernel
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it's mostly targeting modules and FUSE and other userspace stuff. But I agree there should be no rust in the kernel until there is a second compiler like GCC for rust
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The complaint is that currently, when things are in the kernel tree, they get updated for kernel changes. Further, the ways things use the current API is factored into future refactorings and development. This was intentional -- just look at the push back against Hardware Abstraction Layers being added to the kernel tree over the years.
The kernel Rust evangelists then say that no one is saying that you need to learn Rust to contribute to the kernel, but once Rust starts popping up in the kernel tree, you do need to learn it to contribute whether or not anyway says it.
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I wonder if you could rewrite a subset of Linux in Rust and ship that as its own kernel.
You could do a clean break APIs and only support recent interfaces.
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As per this comment from 2015, the "kernel" only makes up ~1% of the code in the kernel tree (and I'd imagine its only gotten smaller since then). Which is still a lot of (very non-trivial) code, but is maybe not totally intractable. I don't know that you gain much though...my vague impression is that the inter-op portion is currently at least workable; the issue is that putting Rust in the kernel requires the kernel devs to know Rust.
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And then he posts a video of his evangelism getting denied on technical grounds
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Snapshots:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Linux-Maintainer-Step-Down:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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the guy around 29:00 is just like
uhhhhhhhhh
uuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
like bro shut the frick up
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