Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 147 posts

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#41

Post by doginasuit »

hughw wrote: post #36
9dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely despise that C convention if abbreviating absolutely every single thing as much as possible. Yeah yeah, that was necessary back in the day when memory was scarce and editors were awful, but come on those days were almost half a century ago by now. Rust may be verbose, but at least you can read it without turning into a cynical greybeard subject matter expert first.

I've found that the less real estate my eyes need to scan, the faster I understand the code, even if its more tersely expressed and requires a little decoding. Relatedly, I've come to appreciate a line of code that does the thing rather than one that calls a function whose name might express what the function does, but I might need to go find it and and read its code. That works well if your language supports a terse…

This is why kotlin is so amazing, unusually concise and unusually clear in meaning.

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#43

Post by lioeters »

devy wrote: post #21

Docs full of emojis, this is another AI slop?! Tangential note: there is already a community effort[1] to rewrite GNU commandline tools into Rust and Canonical shipped the rust version of the /bin/utils in Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon by default[2] in their "oxidizing" initiative.[3] PS: Linus Torvalds has confirmed that the existing Linux kernel will never be fully rewritten in Rust.[4] Let's see how well that stat…

As soon as Linus retires, there will be an initiative to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust assisted by LLMs. Either that, or some company will fund a fork before that. Imagine, man pages full of emojis!

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#44

Post by ImaCake »

skor wrote: post #39
block_dagger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite feeling; I am liking Rust more and more and thinking most of the world's C code should be rewritten. It seems like a sweet spot of enforced memory safety, performance, and human/agent readability.

why rewrite if you can check for and fix bugs? If you are thinking of AI fixing bugs is less expensive

I guess ask the bun people why they translated from zig to rust. I think it was essentially because rust guarantees a set of bugs can't exist so over medium to long term timeframes you end up with less technical debt.

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#45

Post by steveklabnik »

lioeters wrote: post #43
devy wrote: post #21

Docs full of emojis, this is another AI slop?! Tangential note: there is already a community effort[1] to rewrite GNU commandline tools into Rust and Canonical shipped the rust version of the /bin/utils in Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon by default[2] in their "oxidizing" initiative.[3] PS: Linus Torvalds has confirmed that the existing Linux kernel will never be fully rewritten in Rust.[4] Let's see how well that stat…

As soon as Linus retires, there will be an initiative to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust assisted by LLMs. Either that, or some company will fund a fork before that. Imagine, man pages full of emojis!

Linus is supportive of Rust and uses LLMs.

The reasons to not have a full-Rust Linux kernel are over more important, real engineering things. (Platform support being the big one.)

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#46

Post by minimaxir »

skor wrote: post #39
block_dagger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite feeling; I am liking Rust more and more and thinking most of the world's C code should be rewritten. It seems like a sweet spot of enforced memory safety, performance, and human/agent readability.

why rewrite if you can check for and fix bugs? If you are thinking of AI fixing bugs is less expensive

Memory bugs are unknown unknowns that AI may or may not catch. There's net-present-value in switching to a language where certain types of memory bugs are impossible.

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#47

Post by Aurornis »

prologic wrote: post #4

I just compared this Rust implementation against the original C sources. Some ~50k SLOC (Rust) compared to maybe ~8-12k SLOC of C (depending on if you count headers). Why is the Rust implementation so much more complex and onerous?

This repo contains a lot of extra tools and userspace programs.

The majority of Rust the code in the repo is not for the Linux kernel.

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#48

Post by skydhash »

9dev wrote: post #26
sudb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the tradeoffs of Rust is its verbosity I think (in return for which Rustaceans would say you gain explicitness).

I absolutely despise that C convention if abbreviating absolutely every single thing as much as possible. Yeah yeah, that was necessary back in the day when memory was scarce and editors were awful, but come on those days were almost half a century ago by now. Rust may be verbose, but at least you can read it without turning into a cynical greybeard subject matter expert first.

I kinda love it, because verbosity means you have to rely on completion and that has a negative impact on retention.

And the terseness is good when you’re familiar with the code.

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#49

Post by lioeters »

steveklabnik wrote: post #45
lioeters wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as Linus retires, there will be an initiative to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust assisted by LLMs. Either that, or some company will fund a fork before that. Imagine, man pages full of emojis!

Linus is supportive of Rust and uses LLMs. The reasons to not have a full-Rust Linux kernel are over more important, real engineering things. (Platform support being the big one.)

[dead]

Re: Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

#50

Post by Aurornis »

mjhay wrote: post #19

I used to like rust, but I feel like I’m being Pavlovian-conditioned to recoil at its mention now.

This is Linux 0.11 from 1991.

Someone is having fun with a side experiment that has no practical real-world implications.

This stuff is supposed to be fun and we should celebrate when other people are doing fun, pointless things like this. If you're interested then ignore it and move on. There's no need to get involved or comment if a project of no consequence is uninteresting to you personally

Post reply on HN