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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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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