31–40 of 853 posts
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?
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 do firmly expect that we're less than a decade out from seeing some reference algorithm be implemented in Rust rather than C, probably a cryptographic algorithm or a media codec. Although you might argue that the egg library for e-graphs already qualifies.
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"
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: L…
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.
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
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
In what architecture are those types different? Is there a good reason for it there architecturally, or is it just a toolchain idiosyncrasy in terms of how it's exposed (like LP64 vs. LLP64 etc.)?
There was one accelerator architecture we were working that discussed making the entire datapath be 32-bit (taking less space) and having a 32-bit index type with a 64-bit pointer size, but this was eventually rejected as too hard to get working.
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.
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
It's "embedded programming" where you often start to run into weird platforms (or sub-platforms) that only have a c compiler, or the rust compiler that does exist is somewhat borderline. We are sometimes talking about devices which don't even have a gcc port (or the port is based on a very old version of gcc). Which is a shame, because IMO, rust actually excels as an embedded programming language.
Linux is a bit marginal, as it crosses the boundary and is often used as a kernel for embedded devices (especially ones that need to do networking). The 68k people have been hit quite hard by this, linux on 68k is still a semi-common usecase, and while there is a prototype rust back end, it's still not production ready.
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"
(I do agree it's clickbait-y though)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is why most of the world has not been using c/c++ for decades.
That's not true when the topic is operating system kernels.