Using Rust for an Undergraduate OS Course

Why wasn't PHP on the shortlist?

> I considered five possibilities: Java, Python, D, Go, and Rust.

It's a pity that people rarely consider Nimrod (especially when it is far more suitable than the first two possibilities). Here is an example for anyone that is interested: https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel

It looks to be inspired by CMU's "Introduction to Computer Systems" course (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/). The professors who teach that course wrote a textbook, "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" (http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/students.html).

I was a TA for a year for a version of that course adapted to the school I did my PhD at. We did the same thing: this course became the required one, and OS became an elective. I was skeptical as well, but after TAing it for a year, I think it is absolutely the correct thing to do. This course instills an understanding of the whole stack of a computer system that exists in user-land: assembly; how programs are executed including the stack, data segments, dynamic memory; code generation; process management and concurrency; memory allocation; network and server programming. The point of the course is how different levels of the system interact, not just studying one component in isolation. It is the kind of course I wish I had as an undergrad; instead, I had to build that knowledge piecemeal during grad school.

More people will do user-land systems programming than kernel systems programming, so I think it makes sense to make the user-land course required, and the kernel level one an elective.

I was one of the students in this course. If you're interested, I would recommend reading the professor's "course wrap-up"(http://rust-class.org/pages/course-wrapup.html) - it discusses his philosophy going into the semester. In particular, it addresses the most common comment I've seen in this thread, namely the rationale behind choosing to focus on general systems coding rather than kernel hacking.

Personally, I found the course enjoyable and worthwhile. It was not what I was expecting, and I was admittedly disappointed that we didn't go much into actual bare-metal programming. That said, I found it to be a good introduction to the concepts of systems programming, with a few detours. As I am interested in OS coding, I'm performing my own independent study to learn the material which might have been covered in a more "traditional" OS course, but the course did a solid job of covering concurrency, memory allocation, etc.

As for the choice of Rust: I really like the language, and plan to continue using it for personal projects. I'm not sure it was quite mature enough for exclusive use this past semester (the 0.7 to 0.8 switch midway through threw the TAs for a bit of a loop), but I've been very impressed so far, and think that this coming semester of the course (which will also use Rust) should have a much better time of it. The one annoyance I had with Rust was the lack of documentation, but the Rust community (including a fair number of those in this thread) were incredibly helpful, and I'm currently working on a project to provide an alternate tutorial, using a series of small "stepping-stone" programs to build from "Hello, World" to a MapReduce implementation. Personally, I think I might have picked either Go or a blend of C and Rust for this past semester, but Rust is becoming a better choice as time proceeds.

I was also one of the members on the student team that made the ARM kernel in Rust. Due to the timing of the project (right in the middle of preparation for final exams and the rest of our end-of-semester project due dates) and some "lazily evaluated" work ethic on the part of our team, it was fairly rushed, and is much less complete and polished than I would like. I'm planning on continuing work on it. Though I would disagree with the assertion that separating Rust from its runtime is as "painless" as it has been said to be, it wasn't terribly difficult, and solutions for that particular problem are also constantly being improved.

Seems like a fun course. Just not an OS course.