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Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

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Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#131

Post by throwaway2037 »

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…

    > Rust is also too complex for smaller systems to write compilers.
I am not a compiler engineer, but I want to tease apart this statement. As I understand, the main Rust compiler uses LLVM framework which uses an intermediate language that is somewhat like platform independent assembly code. As long as you can write a lexer/parser to generate the intermediate language, there will be a separate backend to generate machine code from the intermediate language. In my (non-compiler-engineer) mind, separates the concern of front-end language (Rust) from target platform (embedded). Do you agree? Or do I misunderstand?

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#132

Post by vlovich123 »

lmm wrote: post #75
ottah wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

Zig at least claims some level of memory safety in their marketing. How real that is I don't know.

About as real as claiming that C/C++ is memory safe because of sanitizers IMHO.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#134

Post by Aldipower »

arilotter wrote: post #4

This 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"

Seems you do not understand the concept of fun. You can learn that, makes your life easier.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#135

Post by vlovich123 »

sayamqazi wrote: post #101
littlestymaar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Zig doesn't bring enough value of its own to be worth bearing the cost of another language in the kernel. Rust is different because it both: - significantly improve the security of the kernel by removing the nastiest class of security vulnerabilities. - And reduce cognitive burden for contributors by allowing to encode in thr typesystem the invariants that must be upheld. That doesn't mean Zig is a bad language…

Pardon my ignorance but I find the claim "removing the nastiest cla ss of security vulnerabilities" to be a bold claim. Is there ZERO use of "unsafe" rust in kernel code??

Aside from the minimal use of unsafe being heavily audited and the only entry point for those vulnerabilities, it allows for expressing kernel rules explicitly and structurally whereas at best there was a code comment somewhere on how to use the API correctly. This was true because there was discussion precisely about how to implement Rust wrappers for certain APIs because it was ambiguous how those APIs were intended to work.

So aside from being like 1-5% unsafe code vs 100% unsafe for C, it’s also more difficult to misuse existing abstractions than it was in the kernel (not to mention that in addition to memory safety you also get all sorts of thread safety protections).

In essence it’s about an order of magnitude fewer defects of the kind that are particularly exploitable (based on research in other projects like Android)

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#136

Post by huflungdung »

Aldipower wrote: post #134
arilotter wrote: post #4

This 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"

Seems you do not understand the concept of fun. You can learn that, makes your life easier.

[dead]

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#137

Post by tormeh »

jcranmer wrote: post #32
drnick1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a set of languages which are essentially required to be available on any viable system. At present, these are probably C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Bash (with a degree of asterisks on the last two). Rust I don't think has made it through that door yet, but on current trends, it's at the threshold and will almost certainly step through. Leaving this set of mandatory languages is difficult (I think Fortran,…

A system only needs one programming language to be useful, and when there's only one it's basically always C.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#138

Post by mustache_kimono »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #98
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?

I think you didn't catch their drift C will continue to be used because it always has been and always will be available everywhere, not only places no one uses :/

> C will continue to be used because it always has been and always will be available everywhere

Yes, you can use it everywhere. Is that what you consider a success?

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#140

Post by IshKebab »

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.

Nah I used to read Phoronix and the articles are a bit clickbaity sometimes but mostly it's fine. The real issue is the reader comments. They're absolute trash.
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