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

Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 853 posts

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#111

Post by mustache_kimono »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #103
mustache_kimono wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every system under the Sun has a C compiler... My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative. This is still the worst possible argument for C. If C persists in places no one uses, then who cares?

You almost certainly have a bunch of devices containing a microcontroller that runs an architecture not targeted by LLVM. The embedded space is still incredibly fragmented. That said, only a handful of those architectures are actually so weird that they would be hard to write a LLVM backend for. I understand why the project hasn’t established a stable backend plugin API, but it would help support these ancillary arch…

> You almost certainly have a bunch of devices containing a microcontroller that runs an architecture not targeted by LLVM.

This is exactly what I'm saying. Do you think HW drives SW or the other way around? When Rust is in the Linux kernel, my guess is it will be very hard to find new HW worth using, which doesn't have some Rust support.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#112

Post by einr »

mmooss wrote: post #60
lmm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously not Is it obvious? I haven't heard of new projects in non-memory-safe languages lately, and I would think they would struggle to attract contributors.

Out of curiosity, do the LLMs all use memory safe languages?

Llama.cpp is called Llama.cpp, so there’s that…

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#113

Post by [deleted] »

DANmode wrote: post #87
DrammBA wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke It was unintentional as per author > Ouch. That is what I get for pushing something out during a meeting, I guess. That was not my point; the experiment is done, and it was a success. I meant no more than that.

The “Ouch.” was in reference to being compared to Phoronix. Has anyone found them to be inaccurate, or fluffy to the point it degraded the content? I haven’t - but then again, probably predominantly reading the best posts being shared on aggregators.

[deleted]

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#115

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

markus_zhang wrote: post #11

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?

It's a bit like asking if there is any significant advantage to ICE motors over electric motors. They both have advantages and disadvantages. Every person who uses one or the other, will tell you about their own use case, and why nobody could possibly need to use the alternative.

There's already applications out there for the "old thing" that need to be maintained, and they're way too old for anyone to bother with re-creating it with the "new thing". And the "old thing" has some advantages the "new thing" doesn't have. So some very specific applications will keep using the "old thing". Other applications will use the "new thing" as it is convenient.

To answer your second question, nothing is inevitable, except death, taxes, and the obsolescence of machines. Rust is the new kid on the block now, but in 20 years, everybody will be rewriting all the Rust software in something else (if we even have source code in the future; anyone you know read machine code or punch cards?). C'est la vie.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#116

Post by estebank »

vbezhenar wrote: post #95
lmm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox and Chrome already contain significant amounts of Rust code, and the proportion is increasing.

https://github.com/chromium/chromium : C++ 74.0%, Java 8.8%, Objective-C++ 4.8%, TypeScript 4.2%, HTML 2.5%, Python 2.4%, Other 3.3% https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox : JavaScript 28.9%, C++ 27.9%, HTML 21.8%, C 10.4%, Python 2.9%, Kotlin 2.7%, Other 5.4% How significant?

According to https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/, 12%.

I would love an updated version of https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1flUGg6Ut4bjtyWdyH_9e... (which stops in 2020).

For Chrome, I don't know if anyone has compiled the stats, but navigating from https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... I see at least a bunch of vendored crates, so there's some use, which makes sense since in 2023 they announced that they would support it.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#118

Post by buster »

mmooss wrote: post #27
markus_zhang wrote: post #11

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?

Before we ask if almost all things old will be rewritten in Rust, we should ask if almost all things new are being written in Rust or other memory-safe languages? Obviously not. When will that happen? 15 years? Maybe it's generational: How long before developers 'born' into to memory-safe languages as serious choices will be substantially in charge of software development?

I don't know I tend to either come across new tools written in Rust, JavaScript or Python but relatively low amount of C. The times I see some "cargo install xyz" in a git repo of some new tool is definitely noticeable.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#119

Post by johncolanduoni »

obviouslynotme wrote: post #71
markus_zhang wrote: post #11

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?

A lot of C's popularity is with how standard and simple it is. I doubt Rust will be the safe language of the future, simply because of its complexity. The true future of "safe" software is already here, JavaScript. There will be small niches leftover: * Embedded - This will always be C. No memory allocation means no Rust benefits. Rust is also too complex for smaller systems to write compilers. * OS / Kernel - Nearly…

> Google has probably the largest C++ codebase in the world. Migrating to Rust would be so expensive that the board would squash it.

Google is transitioning large parts of Android to Rust and there is now first-party code in Chromium and V8 in Rust. I’m sure they’ll continue to write new C++ code for a good while, but they’ve made substantial investments to enable using Rust in these projects going forward.

Also, if you’re imagining the board of a multi-trillion dollar market cap company is making direct decisions about what languages get used, you may want to check what else in this list you are imagining.

Post reply on HN