OPINION
THE RUST SETTLES
Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been involved with Linux for over 22 years, and works on energy-efficient Arm servers.
I recently attended a Linux Foundation networking event at which a few of the usual suspect kernel developers were in attendance. I mentioned to a few of the kernel folks present that I don’t get to write a lot of kernel code any more. I asked how they thought I could best invest a small amount of spare time that I do have to contribute. The answer was quite surprising: help advance the work to support Rust. I’m not a fan of following whizz-bang languages du jour, so my inclination has been to be dismissive of Rust. After all, “just rewrite it all in Rust” is beyond a meme. The real world doesn’t work like that. If it did, we’d have moved on from C and C++ a very long time ago. But the folks I was chatting with also didn’t intend to convey Rust as a replacement for C.