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July 18, 2020 09:34 pm

'Will 2020 Be The Year Of Rust In The Linux Kernel?'

An intriguing exchange happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing List after a post by Nick Desaulniers, a Google software engineer working on compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang (and LLVM). Hackaday reports:Nick simply tested the waters for a possible future of Rust within the Linux kernel code base, which is something he's planning to bring up for discussion in this year's Linux Plumbers Conference — the annual kernel developer gathering. [Desaulniers thinks that discussion will include "a larger question of 'should we do this?' or 'how might we place limits on where this can be used?'"] The interesting part is Linus Torvalds's response on the LKML thread, which leaves everyone hoping for a hearty signature Rust rant akin to his C++ one disappointed. Instead, his main concern is that a soft and optional introduction of the support in the build system would leave possible bugs hidden, and therefore should be automatically enabled if a Rust compiler is present — essentially implying that he seems otherwise on board. Linus also touched on Rust earlier this month in his keynote interview with Dirk Hohndel, the chief open source officer at VMware, during the special virtual edition of the Linux Foundation's annual Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America: Dirk Hohndel: Every new project is done in Go or Rust or another new language I've never heard of. Is there a risk that we are becoming the COBOL programmers of the 2030s? Linus Torvalds: Well, I don't actually think it's true that nobody writes in C any more. I think C is still one of the top 10 languages easily, if you look at any of the statistics. That said — I mean, people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day. I mean, it might not be Rust, but it is going to happen that we will have different models for writing these kinds of things. And C won't be the only one. I mean right now, it's C or assembly, and most people would rather not touch the assembly parts. [Dirk laughs] But it is something that people are looking at. I'm probably the wrong person. Greg has been more involved, since he's the driver maintainer in general. But things are afoot, and these things take a long, long time. I mean, the kind of infrastructure you need to start integrating other languages into a kernel, and making people trust these other languages — that's a big step.

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