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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

tormeh wrote: post #137
jcranmer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#282

Post by keybored »

devsda wrote: post #169
tzury wrote: post #148

> Mike: rachel and i are no longer dating > > rachel: mike that's a horrible way of telling people we're married from the meme section on that page.

> same Mike in an org wide email: thank you all for your support. Starting next week I will no longer be a developer here. I thank my manager blah blah... I will be starting my dream role as Architect and I hope to achieve success. > Mike's colleagues: Aww.. We'll miss you. > Mike's manager: Is this your one week's notice? Did you take up an architect job elsewhere immediately after I promoted you to architect ?!

Joke, enterprise edition..

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#283

Post by johncolanduoni »

IshKebab wrote: post #191
ykonstant wrote: post #181

I need to check the rust parts of the kernel, I presume there is significant amounts of unsafe. Is unsafe Rust a bit better nowadays? I remember a couple of years ago people complained that unsafe is really hard to write and very "un-ergonomic".

I don't think unsafe Rust has gotten any easier to write, but I'd also be surprised if there was much unsafe except in the low-level stuff (hard to write Vec without unsafe), and to interface with C which is actually not hard to write. Mostly Rust has been used for drivers so far. Here's the first Rust driver I found: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/2137cb863b80187103151... It has one trivial use of `unsafe` -…

Drivers are interesting from a safety perspective, because on systems without an IOMMU sending the wrong command to devices can potentially overwrite most of RAM. For example, if the safe wrappers let you write arbitrary data to a PCIe network card’s registers you could retarget a receive queue to the middle of a kernel memory page.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#284

Post by simonask »

einpoklum wrote: post #200
blintz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t rustc emit LLVM IR? Are there a lot of systems that LLVM doesn’t support?

Many organizations and environments will not switch themselves to LLVM to hamfist compiled Rust code. Nor is the fact of LLVM supporting something in principle means that it's installed on the relevant OS distribution.

Using LLVM somewhere in the build doesn't require that you compile everything with LLVM. It generates object files, just like GCC, and you can link together object files compiled with each compiler, as long as they don't use compiler-specific runtime libraries (like the C++ standard library, or a polyfill compiler-rt library).

`clang-cl` does this with `cl.exe` on Windows.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#285

Post by oblio »

einpoklum wrote: post #200
blintz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t rustc emit LLVM IR? Are there a lot of systems that LLVM doesn’t support?

Many organizations and environments will not switch themselves to LLVM to hamfist compiled Rust code. Nor is the fact of LLVM supporting something in principle means that it's installed on the relevant OS distribution.

If you're developing, you generally have control over the development environment (+/-) and you can install things. Plus that already reduces the audience: set of people with oddball hardware (as someone here put it) intersected with the set of people with locked down development environments.

Let alone the fact that conceptually people with locked down environments are precisely those would really want the extra safety offered by Rust.

I know that real life is messy but if we don't keep pressing, nothing improves.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#286

Post by pjmlp »

m00dy wrote: post #37

C++ devs are spinning in their graves now.

Why should they?

Other platforms don't have a leader that hates C++, and then accepts a language that is also quite complex, even has two macro systems of Lisp like wizardy, see Serde.

OSes have been being written with C++ on the kernel, since the late 1990's, and AI is being powered by hardware (CUDA) that was designed specifically to accomodate C++ memory model.

Also Rust compiler depends on a compiler framework written in C++, without it there is no Rust compiler, and apparently they are in no hurry to bootstrap it.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#287

Post by debugnik »

gjajric wrote: post #223
debugnik wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most existing Rust developers are not "blank slate Rust developers" Not most, but the pool of software devs has been doubling every five years, and Rust matches C# on "Learning to Code" voters at Stack Overflow's last survey, which is crazy considering how many people learn C# just to use Unity. I think you underestimate how many developers are Rust blank slates. Anecdotically, I've recently come across comments fr…

[dead]

Oh I agree the survey has issues, I was just thinking about how each year the stats get more questionable! I just think it shows that interest in Rust doesn't come only from people with a C++ codebase to rewrite. Half of all devs have got less than five years of experience with any toolchain at all, let alone C++, yet many want to give Rust a try. I do think there will be a generational split there.

> Steve Klabnik?

Thankfully no. I've actually argued with him a couple times. Usually in partial agreement, but his fans will downvote anyone who mildly disagrees with him.

Also, I'm not even big on Rust: every single time I've tried to use it I instinctively reached for features that turned out to be unstable, and I don't want to deal with their churn, so I consider the language still immature.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#289

Post by fuzztester »

tgma wrote: post #159
hgs3 wrote: post #155

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.

Just use MINIX, or GNU Hurd.

Even better, be like the Amish, and build your own as much as you can.

Re: Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental

#290

Post by K0nserv »

gjajric wrote: post #251
herni wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Rust shines when you need perform "unsafe" operations. It forces programmers to be explicit and isolate their use of unsafe memory operations. This makes it significantly more feasible to keep track of invariants. It is completely besides the point that you can also write "shit code" in Rust. Just because you are fed up with the "reimplement the world in Rust" culture does not mean that the tool itself is…

[flagged]

1. This doesn't really matter for the argument. Most of the time you can audit unsafe blocks, in some instances the invariants you are upholding require you to consider more code. The benefit is still that you can design safe interfaces around these smaller bits of audited code.

2. I agree it's harder, I feel like most of the community knows and recognises this.

> Maybe Rust proponents should spend more time on making unsafe Rust easier and more ergonomic, instead of effectively *undermining safety and security*. Unless the strategy is to trick as many other people as possible into using Rust, and then hope those people fix the issues for you, a common strategy normally used for some open source projects, not languages.

I don't think there is any evidence that Rust is undermining safety and security. In fact all evidence shows it's massively improving these metrics wherever Rust replaces C and C++ code. If you have evidence to the contrary let's see it.

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