this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Linus hit the nail on the head. If you've been a Kernel dev for a decade or more, and have spent decades learning the ins and outs of C, why would you want to switch to something that is similar, but different in a lot of ways, just because a small subset of devs think it's the best way forward? Let them handle Rust and the majority of devs will keep using C, even though Rust is objectively better.
As one of the other quotes suggested: fork the kernel project and rewrite it entirely in Rust, that way there isn't any push back from the C devs. Replacing C with Rust in the upstream kernel is akin to replacing the engine in a car while it's running or being used every day.
That's not practically possible given the scale of the kernel. And doing a total rewrite is almost always a recipe for getting stuck and, if you ever create anything, creating something worse.
Almost all real-world software development is like this. That's what we do.
Yeah it is a monumental task, but it's also the one with the least push back. I don't mean start from scratch, but convert the C code to Rust in a dev branch or something and release a Linux-Rust kernel image.
I'm aware, I've written my own software even though I'm a SysEng, all I'm saying is that it's not an easy process with a potential for disaster. Just look at CrowdStrike (not saying that they were attempting to switch languages but just the scale of the fuck up and the fallout that it caused), we don't want that to happen with Linux.