Things Are Getting Rusty In Kernel Land
hackaday.com
There is gathering momentum around the idea of adding Rust to the Linux kernel. Why exactly is that a big deal, and what does this mean for the rest of us? The Linux kernel has been just C and asse…
    • Ephera
      101·
      3 years ago

      I think, they’re simply aware that few young devs learn C these days. The former Lingua Franca is declining in popularity and if they still want to have devs in twenty years, they need to start making a move now. Porting the whole kernel to a different language is going to take a long time…

        • Ephera
          1·
          3 years ago

          I’ve had contact with C in a course in university, too, but I never felt anywhere close to as productive as with e.g. Java. Learning C felt more like a historic exhibition than like learning a tool I would actually use.

          And yeah, there’s this saying/quote, which goes something like “code is low-level when it concerns itself with uninteresting details”. And C definitely feels like that to me.

          Rust has kind of broken that saying, because it allows low-level machine access, but actually offers rather high-level abstractions.
          I mean, you do notice that Rust doesn’t use garbage collection, so that is one detail which I largely deem uninteresting as a human that just wants to make things go beep-boop, but yeah, it is still an enormous improvement in the uninteresting details department.

  • Tiuku@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    3 years ago

    How great is Rust without an operating system? I mean that hosted C++ implementations are great with their algorithms and whatnot, but freestanding implementations don’t actually add too much to plain C.

  • obbeel
    21·
    3 years ago

    Firefox trusts Rust, I distrust Rust. It’s as simple as that.