Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he’s had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.

From Wedon’s post on the kernel mailing list:

I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.

…

I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.

Lastly, I’ll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 – and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    113·
    20 days ago

    Oof, that video… I don’t have enough patience to put up with that sort of thing either. I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.

    • rollmagma@lemmy.world
      94·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • ramble81@lemm.ee
        16·
        20 days ago

        folks that have been doing this exclusively for 30 years

        And yet the number of people I hear “just switch to Linux!” When the other person has been using Windows for 30 years blows my mind.

        Inertia is a hell of a drug.

        • superkret@feddit.org
          67·
          20 days ago

          I wouldn’t tell a Windows developer with 30 years experience to just switch to developing for Linux.
          Users are different. Most people who have used Windows for 30 years never touch anything outside of the desktop, taskbar and Explorer.

          • Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz
            11·
            20 days ago

            I have been using Windows for 30 years and Linux for 25 years (debian since 99’). I really would not bash (pun intended) windows users so much, there is place for both of them.

          • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
            4·
            20 days ago

            It’s insane to find a windows user that doesn’t live in the terminal, it’s just not designed for it

            Linux has a gui for everything

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      65·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • moriquende@lemmy.world
        15·
        20 days ago

        let’s not lose focus of what’s important here, and that is a room full of people hearing my voice and paying attention to me for as long as I manage to hold it

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      32·
      20 days ago

      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.

    • cerement@slrpnk.net
      25·
      20 days ago

      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

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        19 days ago

        All you need nowadays for a decent Unix-like is compatibility with a handful of Linux softwares and a web browser. Hell, if you could get WINE working on your kernel you could maybe support as many Windows apps/games as Linux for free.

        The big issue, as I see it, is performant drivers for a wide range of hardware. That doesn’t come easy, but I wonder if that can be addressed in a way I’m too inexperienced to know.

        But projects like Redox are a genuine threat to the hegemony of Linux - if memory safety isn’t given the true recognition it deserves, projects like Redox serve to be the same disrupting force as Linux once was for UNIX.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      20 days ago

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

    • WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      19 days ago

      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.

  • Findmysec@infosec.pubEnglish
    81·
    20 days ago

    Who the fuck is this little shit? Can’t they even be a little considerate towards rust? Just because they have 15 years worth of inertia for C doesn’t mean they can close their eyes and say “nope, I’m not interested”. I do not see how the kernel can survive without making rust a first class citizen

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    60·
    20 days ago

    The comments from that article are some of the most vitriolic I’ve ever seen on a technical issue. Goes to prove the maintainer’s point though.

    Some are good for a laugh though, like assertions that Rust in the kernel is a Microsoft sabotage op or LLVM is for grifters and thieves.

  • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
    53·
    19 days ago

    This is a little off topic and admittedly an oversimplification, but people saying Rust’s memory safety isn’t a big deal remind me of people saying static typing isn’t a big deal.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
    45·
    20 days ago

    The video attached is a perfect example of the kind of “I’m not prepared to learn anything new so everyone else is wrong” attitude that is eating away at Linux like a cancer.

    If memory safety isn’t adopted into the kernel, and C fanaticism discarded, Linux will face the same fate as the kernels it once replaced. Does the Linux foundation want to drag its heels and stuff millions into AI ventures whilst sysadmins quietly shift to new kernels that offer memory safety, or does it want to be part of that future?

    • WarmApplePieShrek@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      21·
      19 days ago

      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.

      • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
        40·
        19 days ago

        There is no “your” new rust kernel. There is a gigantic ship of Theseus that is the Linux kernel, and many parts of it are being rewritten, refactored, removed an added all the time by god knows how many different people. Some of those things will be done in rust.

        Can we stop reacting to this the way conservatives react to gay people? Just let some rust exist. Nobody is forcing everyone to be gay, and nobody is forcing everybody to immediately abandon C and rewrite everything in rust.

      • witx@lemmy.sdf.org
        34·
        19 days ago

        Isn’t Linux still Linux even though probably a lot of the original code is gone? Why would slowly rewriting it whole, or just parts, in Rust make it stop being Linux?

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        17 days ago

        the crew on the Ship of Theseus would like a word with you. Because if you strip out every subsystem and replace them with a different language, everyone would still call it Linux and it would still work as Linux.

        Linux isn’t “a bunch of C code” it’s an API, an ABI, and a bunch of drivers bundled into a monorepo.

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
      18·
      20 days ago

      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

      • Vivendi@lemmy.zip
        6·
        19 days ago

        Avis/Bridei/Artem has been active as a super troll on that forum for years and absolutely nothing had been done

      • vividspecter@lemm.ee
        4·
        19 days ago

        Beyond moderation, Phoronix is a case study in why downvotes are a good thing. Those idiots going on dumb tangents would continue, while the rest of us can read the actual worthwhile comments (which does happen, given AMD employees and the like comment there sometimes).

      • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.ukEnglish
        3·
        19 days ago

        I’ve asked one question, one time in those comments and it just got buried in people spitting venom at each other about their file system preferences.

    • morrowind@lemmy.ml
      16·
      20 days ago

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

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        20 days ago

        I once started reading the comments on bcachefs. It was a extremely heated for no reason. People were screaming on the nature of btrfs

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
    32·
    19 days ago

    There’s always going to be pushback on new ideas. He’s basically asking people questions like “Hey how does your thing work? I want to write it in rust.” and gets the answer “I’m not going to learn rust.”.

    I think rust is generally a good thing and with a good amount of tests to enforce behavior it’s possible to a functionally equivalent copy of the current code with no memory issues in future maintenance of it. Rewriting things in rust will also force people to clarify the behavior and all possible theoretical paths a software can take.

    I’m not gonna lie though, if I would have worked on software for 20 years and people would introduce component that’s written in another language my first reaction would be “this feels like a bad idea and doesn’t seem necessary”.

    I really hope that the kernel starts taking rust seriously, it’s a great tool and I think it’s way easier to write correct code in rust than C. C is simple but lacks the guardrails of modern languages which rust has.

    The process of moving to rust is happening but it’s going to take a really long time. It’s a timescale current maintainers don’t really need to worry about since they’ll be retired anyway.

      • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
        14·
        19 days ago

        For the same reason spoken languages often have semantic structures that make a literal translation often cumbersome and incorrect, translating nontrivial code from one language into another without being a near expert in both langauges, as well as being an expert in the project in question, can lead to differences in behaviour varying from “it crashes and takes down the OS with it”, to “it performs worse”.

        • MattMatt@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          19 days ago

          I’ll add that even when you’re an expert in both languages, it’s common to see WTF’s in the original and not be sure if something is a bug or just weird behavior that’s now expected. Especially when going from a looser to a more strict language.

          I’ve translated huge projects and most of the risk is in “you know the original would do the wrong thing in these x circumstances – I’m pretty sure that’s not on purpose but… Maybe? Or maybe now someone depends on it being wrong like this?”

          • Caveman@lemmy.world
            4·
            19 days ago

            Also, even if you think it’s a bug it might be a feature that other people use and “fixing” changing it might break systems.

    • root@precious.net
      3·
      17 days ago

      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.

  • svcg
    27·
    19 days ago

    I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.

    Maybe that’s not a bad thing? If you ask me the GNU people are missing a trick. Perhaps if they rewrote Hurd in Rust they could finally shed that “/Linux”.

  • x00za@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    23·
    20 days ago

    Even though I respect and applaud the move towards Rust, I absolutely hate the syntax and a lot of the logic.

    Maybe the person in the video secretly feels the same way.

    • fluxx@lemmy.world
      18·
      20 days ago

      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.

    • OrekiWoof@lemmy.ml
      14·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
        10·
        19 days ago

        I wouldn’t say that. For primitives yeah, day or two. But if you want to build a proper program, it’ll take time to get used to it. For my first few projects I just used clone everywhere. Passing by reference and managing lifetimes, specially when writing libraries is something that takes time to get used to. I still don’t feel confident.

        Besides that I do like Rust though. Sometimes I feel like “just let me do that, C let’s me”, but I know it’s just adding safety where C wouldn’t care.

      • x00za@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        9·
        19 days ago

        I didn’t. And I also dislike the methodology behind this way of programming.

        But that’s personal and doesn’t make me want to trashtalk Rust during somebody’s talk about it.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
        7·
        19 days ago

        Unless you’re a functional programming purist or coming from a systems programming background, it takes a lot longer than a few days to get used to the borrow checker. If you’re coming as someone who most often uses garbage-collected languages, it’s even worse.

        The problem isn’t so much understanding what the compiler is bitching about, as it is understanding why the paradigm you used isn’t safe and learning how to structure your code differently. That part takes the longest and only really starts to become easier when you learn to stop fighting the language.

        • OrekiWoof@lemmy.ml
          3·
          19 days ago

          I see that my previous comment is not the common reality apparently.

          I’m mainly a C# + js dev of a few years, and I would love to see what precisely other people here are having problems with, because I’ve had a completely different experience to most of the people replying.

      • Metype @lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 days ago

        I tried for about a week: reading documentation, viewing and modifying example programs, using a Rust IDE with warnings for all my silly mistakes, the works. I couldn’t manage to wrap my head around it. It’s so different from what I’m used to. If I could dedicate like a month to learn it I would, but I don’t have the time :/

    • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
      3·
      20 days ago

      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

        • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
          1·
          16 days ago

          I hate how I can’t do everything I imagine in rust.

          But researching about why something isn’t possible, makes me realize that the code should never be wroten like the way I did… so I can’t blame rust for dissallowing me this.

    • Wooki@lemmy.world
      3·
      19 days ago

      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.

  • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ@lemm.ee
    20·
    20 days ago

    RUST ppl feel like ARCH ppl. yes it might be better than some other setup yadda yadda, but they are so enervating.i’d rather switch back to windows11 than read another post/blog on how som crustians replaced this or that c library. just shut up already.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      6·
      20 days ago

      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).

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.mlEnglish
        23·
        20 days ago

        It was never about replacing C with a new language for the sake of novelty, it was about solving the large majority of security vulnerabilities that are inherent in memory-unsafe languages.

        If Rust were to implode tomorrow, some other memory-safe language would come along and become equally annoying to developers who think they’re the first and only person to suggest just checking the code really hard for memory issues before merge.

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      5·
      19 days ago

      Arch people tell you “I use arch BTW”

      Rust people make PRs rewriting your code in rust.

      Rust people are worse.

  • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
    19·
    20 days ago

    At the cost of sounding naive and stupid, wouldn’t it be possible to improve compilers to not spew out unsafe executables? Maybe as a compile time option so people have time to correct the source.

    • chrash0@lemmy.world
      67·
      20 days ago

      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

    • it_depends_man@lemmy.worldEnglish
      50·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • ik5pvx@lemmy.world
        13·
        20 days ago

        Thank you and all the others that took time to educate me on what is for me a “I know some of those words” subject

    • snaggen@programming.dev
      16·
      20 days ago

      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.

    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
      14·
      20 days ago

      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.

  • gencha@lemm.ee
    13·
    19 days ago

    I feel like the time to hide information behind YouTube links is over. Feels like a link to a paywall article at this point.

  • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
    13·
    19 days ago

    I admit I’m biased towards C-languages out of sheer personal preference and limited exposure to Rust but I am wondering, are there any major technical barriers to Rust replacing these languages in it’s current form anymore?

    I know there has been a lot of movement towards supporting Rust in the last 6 years since I’ve become aware of it, but I also get flashbacks from the the early 00’s when I would hear about how Java was destined to replace C++, and the early 2010’s when Python was destined to replace everything only to realize that the hype fundamentally misunderstood the use case limitations of the various languages.

    • bonus_crab@lemmy.world
      6·
      19 days ago

      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.