Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been involved with Linux for over 22 years, and works on energy-efficient ARM servers.
Last month I discussed burnout in the kernel community, particularly as a side effect of assorted contentious debates. One of the larger, more contentious debates has centred around the adoption of Rust.
Arguments over Rust were enough to drive the Asahi (Apple Silicon) Linux project lead to quit. That’s too bad, but it’s not an isolated event.
Central to the debate is that of introducing a new language with very different semantics from C, in which the kernel was originally written. C does not have the concept of memory safety and instead allows you to do very bad and dangerous things with memory, assuming you know what you’re doing. Rust is constructed to be safe and won’t allow you to do things that could lead to memory safety bugs that cause crashes or security exploits.
This month’s discussions tended towards more obscure corners, including how data structures get passed around in modern ABIs, the maturity of Rust compilers, and the fluid nature of the spec for the language itself. The thread included a couple of Linus zingers about his perceived failings of the C standard. The thread is worth reading over a coffee: https://bit.ly/lxf327kern.