Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
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Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#12Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
It’s available on more obscure platforms than Rust, and more people are familiar with it.
I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable that everything will be rewritten in Rust, at the very least this will this decades. C has been with us for more than half a century and is the foundation of pretty much everything, it will take a long time to migrate all that.
More likely is that they will live next to each other for a very, very long time.
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#13This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
I'm having deja Vu. Was there another quite similar headline here a few weeks or so ago?
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#14Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Every system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#15Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#16This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek.
Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: Let's forgive.
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#17This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
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Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#18Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Every system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
I can’t think of many real world production systems which don’t have a rust target. Also I’m hopeful the GCC backend for rustc makes some progress and can become an option for the more esoteric ones
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#19Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Every system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
What other newfangled alternative to C was ever adopted in the Linux kernel?
I have no doubt C will be around for a long time, but I think Rust also has a lot of staying power and won’t soon be replaced.
Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
#20Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields).
Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has made a couple of decisions that make it hard for some of those architectures to be supported well. For example, Rust has decided that the array index type, the object size type, and the pointer size type are all the same type, which is not the case for a couple of architectures; it's also the case that things like segmented pointers don't really work in Rust (of course, they barely work in C, but barely is more than nothing).