It’s always been this way. Except that it was kernel developers arguing with kernel developers over C code. Now it’s relative newcomers arguing with kernel developers over Rust code that the kernel devs don’t necessarily care about. Of course it’s going to be a mess.

A fork is of course possible, but operating systems are huge and very complex, you really don’t want to alienate these folks that have been doing exclusively this for 30 years. It would be hard to keep the OS commercially viable with a smaller group and having to do both the day to day maintenance, plus the rewrite. It’s already difficult as it is currently.

Rust will be a huge success in time, long after the current names have lost their impetus. This is not a “grind for 4 years and it’s done” project.

That person in the audience was really grinding my gears. Just let the folks you’re talking to answer you; no need to keep going on your diatribe when it’s based on a false assumption and waste the whole room’s time.

I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.

It sounds highly impractical, and it would probably introduce more issues than Rust solves, even if there were enough people with enough free time to do it. Any change must be evolutionary if it’s going to be achievable.

NOT a fork of Linux, but Redox is aiming for a Unix-like OS based on Rust – but even with “source compatibility” with Linux/BSD and drivers being in userspace, my guess would be hardware drivers are still going to be a big speed bump

Just fork and port Ext4 to Rust and let the little shit sit in his leaking kiddy pool out back.

There’s certainly a history of Unix and Unix-like forks; which is rather simple compared to the Linux distro forks (go right to the big pic).

You should do it. The Linux kernel is a C project. You can’t change a 30-year project on a dime. Make your own project with Rust and hookers.

That’s pretty well answered here: http://vger.kernel.org/lkml/#s15-3

Why not React?

It’s Ted Ts’o, the maintainer of the ext4 filesystem amongst other things.

little shit

Though you’re still accurate despite his seniority.

Totally

Phoronix comments were always dumb, like, infuriating bad, I don’t even read them anymore, the moderation on that site don’t give a fuck about toxicity in there

Phoronix comments are a special place on the internet. Don’t go there for a good discussion.

If Linux gets rewritten in Rust it will be a new kernel, not Linux. You can make new kernels, even in Rust but they aren’t Linux. You can advertise them at Linux conferences but you can’t force every Linux dev to work on your new Rust kernel.

I apologize if this is more nontechnical nonsense as Im not a coder, but if the projects are open source, cant he just read and translate the code?

From a developer standpoint you’re taking someone’s baby, cloning it into a language they don’t understand and deprecating the original. Worse, if you’re not actually interested in taking over the project you’ve now made it abandonware because the original developer lost heart and the person looking for commit counts on GitHub has moved on.

Obviously these extremes don’t always apply, but a lot of open source relies on people taking a personal interest. If you destroy that, you might just destroy the project.

They will write kernel in Ada

GNU isn’t punchy though; as soon as any punchy word get’s associated with them, people will use that word instead, and we’ll just get GNU/Thermite or GNU/Abson or something.

Maybe a pipe dream, but I would love to see RedoxOS get some traction. A rust based microkernel is a promising concept.

Well, I’ve been a C/C++ dev for half of my career, I didn’t find Rust syntax ugly. Some things are better than others, but not a major departure from C/C++. ObjC is where ugly is at. And I even think swift is more ugly. In fact, I can’t find too many that are as close to C/C++ as Rust. As for logic… Well, I want to say you’ll get used to it, but for some things, it’s not true. Rust is a struggle. Whether it’s worth it, is your choice. I personally would take it over C++ any day.

I just don’t understand this. You get used to the syntax and borrow checker in a day or two. It’s a non-issue.

That doesn’t really excuse its behavior in the video though.

At rhe beginning, I did hate it. Now I slowly embrace it as it seems like a feature to be mkre verbose.

But maybe it will never change and I will just gaslight myself liking it. Whatever… you cant take my fun away learning rust for half a year

You’ve been blue pilled by null. Once over the hurdle, it’s very eloquent.

Null is ugly. Tony Hoare apology for inventing it should be enough reason to learn to do better.

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The sad thing is, there are other languages better at replacing C/C++ due to closer resemblance, except they’re rarely used due to lack of trendy technology that is being hyped in Rust. D lost a lot of ground due to its maintainers didn’t make it an “immutable by default” language at the time when functional programming paradigm was the next big thing in programming (which D can still do, as long as you’re not too fussy about using const everywhere).

Arch people tell you “I use arch BTW”

Rust people make PRs rewriting your code in rust.

Rust people are worse.

the semantics of C make that virtually impossible. the compiler would have to make some semantics of the language invalid, invalidating patterns that are more than likely highly utilized in existing code, thus we have Rust, which built its semantics around those safety concepts from the beginning. there’s just no way for the compiler to know the lifetime of some variables without some semantic indication

At the cost of sounding naive and stupid

It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.

The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.

But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.

It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.

And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.

The problem is that C is a prehistoric language and don’t have any of the complex types for example. So, in a modern language you create a String. That string will have a length, and some well defined properties (like encoding and such). With C you have a char * , which is just a pointer to the memory that contains bytes, and hopefully is null terminated. The null termination is defined, but not enforced. Any encoding is whatever the developer had in mind. So the compiler just don’t have the information to make any decisions. In rust you know exactly how long something lives, if something try to use it after that, the compiler can tell you. With C, all lifetimes lives in the developers head, and the compiler have no way of knowing. So, all these typing and properties of modern languages, are basically the implementation of your suggestion.

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.

If you write unsafe code then how should it compile?

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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.