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'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Can someone distill the good faith argument against rust? Is there one?
https://xkcd.com/927/
The problem is that even if it's objectively better, you can't magically convert everything instantaneously, and it's a lot more work maintaining rust and C versions of the same code until everything is re-implemented in rust.
Only one compiler nailed to LLVM. And other reasons already mentioned.
it's more niche than C, has less competency available, works very differently to C, and requires a whole new toolchain to be added to the already massive kernel compilation process. for it to be plain sailing adding it to the kernel some of the worlds' foremost domain experts on operating systems would have to re-learn basically everything.
~~also since rust is just coming up on 15 years of existence without a 1.0 release, there's no way to ensure that the code written today will be considered well-formed by the time 1.0 hits.~~
??? Rust 1.0 was released 10 years ago and since then there have been no breaking changes.
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/05/15/Rust-1.0.html
so it was! cool!
i will admit i'm not very well versed in rust, the only time i've used it was in like 2016, in an embedded context where there were hard restrictions on what could be used. no crates, no macros, no traits, no threading, and a very limited number of functions. procedural style, basically. someone else chose the wrong language and i just had to work within the system.
if the language is stable, i'm assuming the instability issues come from external crates? or are they just made up?
I havent noticed any problems with instability, at least for web server development it is stable enough. But it may be different in other contexts like embedded. And its true that many libraries still have 0.x versions.
This is the core problem. It's a social problem, not a technical one.
Syntax ugly