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…
  • Jonny@lemmy.rimkus.it
    10·
    2 years ago

    maybe they are afraid of redox :) I’m looking forward to test a Unix like OS with a Kernel written completely from scratch in Rust

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      101·
      2 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…

      • Jonny@lemmy.rimkus.it
        2·
        2 years ago

        Hmm, but I hear from many students that they at least had a contact with C. In my opinion the problem with C is, that you have to take care of too many things, e.g memory and pointer management, which can fast turn into really difficult to understand code, especially when you’re dealing with many libraries. Having a language which helps in memory management is a very big help and lead’s to more stable code

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 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·
    2 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@lemmy.ml
    21·
    2 years ago

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

    • Jonny@lemmy.rimkus.it
      1·
      2 years ago

      In the end you can’t trust any high level programming language. Nobody looks into the generated assembler code, or reads and understands all the vm’s/interpreter…