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What yucky politics?
Probably something silly because we live in the age of polarization and thoughts compressed in 150 character tweets.
Rust in the kernel feels like a red herring. For fault tolerance and security, wouldn’t it be a superior solution to migrate Linux to a microkernel architecture? That way, drivers and various other components could be isolated in sandboxes.
Microkernel architecture doesn't magically eliminate bugs, it just replaces a subset of kernel panics with app crashes. Bugs will be there, they will keep impacting users, they will need to be fixed. Rust would still help to eliminate those bugs.
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That's not how it works. Once in control, vanguardism defends itself by suppressing all dissent. It does not dissipate. It grows like a virus.
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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?
> 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.
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What yucky politics?
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?
Apple handled this problem by adding memory safety to C (Firebloom). It seems unlikely they would throw away that investment and move to Rust. I’m sure lots of other companies don’t want to throw away their existing code, and when they write new code there will always be a desire to draw on prior art.
After all the resistance to Rust in the Linux Kernel, it's finally official. Kudos to the Linux Rust team!
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> It seems unlikely [Apple] would throw away that investment and move to Rust. Apple has invested in Swift, another high level language with safety guarantees, which happens to have been created under Chris Lattner, otherwise known for creating LLVM. Swift's huge advantage over Rust, for application and system programming is that it supports an ABI [1] which Rust, famously, does not (other than falling back to a C AB…
Swift does not seem suitable for OS development, at least not as much as C or C++.[0] Swift handles by default a lot of memory by using reference counting, as I understand it, which is not always suitable for OS development. [0]: Rust, while no longer officially experimental in the Linux kernel, does not yet have major OSs written purely in it.