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

Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#61

Post by steveklabnik »

simion314 wrote: post #58
lifty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Redox but adoption and traction is minimal. But these things take time so maybe it will become popular in the future.

I would have expected more then one Rust kernels. It kind of seems that Rust community is missing the ability or the desire to implement a kernel and would like the Linux kernel devs to do the work for them.

There are tons of embedded kernels, Android uses Rust in their Linux, Windows already ships Rust in their kernel. Just because someone mentions one project doesn’t mean it’s an exhaustive list.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#62

Post by itishappy »

speed_spread wrote: post #32
dgb23 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume this type of pushback is one of the main reasons a project like Linux is trustworthy in the first place.

Linus has the wisdom to see the writing on the wall - the kernel is becoming too complex to be maintained and extended by newcomers; the pool of C ninjas that can handle it reliably is diminishing. This kind of foresight is what makes Linux trustworthy in the first place. A lot of current individual contributors lack that vision and fail to understand the reason for introducing what they see as unneeded complexity. T…

> But since Rust is not a technical choice, as Rust cannot per-se do things that are impossible in C - you can do anything in C

Have anything in particular in mind? It's been my understanding that Rust actually can do everything C can, but the additional safety guarantees imposed by the type system make it a bit harder.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#63

Post by pif »

flohofwoe wrote: post #54
rowanG077 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit it's not often I see a direct panic. But I do see bugs caused by memory issues relatively often. In fact two weeks ago I made a patch for a memory issue in a wifi driver that caused it to drop connections. The long list of CVE is more direct proof though. By far most of them are memory safety issues. Suggesting making a new kernel is just total FUD. This is a multi decade project. It's like saying to a person…

> Suggesting making a new kernel is just total FUD. This is a multi decade project. Linux started as a hobby project of a single student and just a few years later it was already possible to build a full-blown UNIX desktop system with Linux as kernel. Why should that not be possible to replicate today? Especially with modern development tooling and a big and motivated language community?

> Why should that not be possible to replicate today?

What is missing is the user base! When Linus started his project, many people knew Unix in their professional life and were disappointed with what the market (M$) was proposing for the personal computer world.

Today, no such multitude is waiting for the next Linux.

Linux may not be perfect, but it's definitely good enough.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#64

Post by speed_spread »

itishappy wrote: post #62
speed_spread wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus has the wisdom to see the writing on the wall - the kernel is becoming too complex to be maintained and extended by newcomers; the pool of C ninjas that can handle it reliably is diminishing. This kind of foresight is what makes Linux trustworthy in the first place. A lot of current individual contributors lack that vision and fail to understand the reason for introducing what they see as unneeded complexity. T…

> But since Rust is not a technical choice, as Rust cannot per-se do things that are impossible in C - you can do anything in C Have anything in particular in mind? It's been my understanding that Rust actually can do everything C can, but the additional safety guarantees imposed by the type system make it a bit harder.

It's true that with a moderate dose of unsafe, and now that #asm!() is stabilized on major platforms, Rust should be able to go the same places as C.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#65

Post by itishappy »

pif wrote: post #53
rowanG077 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news for whom? The mental safe space of old time kernel developers? Or good new for users who will continue to have to deal with kernel panics and other memory issues.

> The mental safe space of old time kernel developers? As long as they are the majority of the kernel developers, their wish is what matters the most.

Not users? Linux development is it's own reward?

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#66

Post by flohofwoe »

pif wrote: post #63
flohofwoe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suggesting making a new kernel is just total FUD. This is a multi decade project. Linux started as a hobby project of a single student and just a few years later it was already possible to build a full-blown UNIX desktop system with Linux as kernel. Why should that not be possible to replicate today? Especially with modern development tooling and a big and motivated language community?

> Why should that not be possible to replicate today? What is missing is the user base! When Linus started his project, many people knew Unix in their professional life and were disappointed with what the market (M$) was proposing for the personal computer world. Today, no such multitude is waiting for the next Linux. Linux may not be perfect, but it's definitely good enough.

Ideally such a Rust kernel project would implement a drop-in-replacement for the Linux kernel, so that Linux distros could select between the original Linux kernel and the Rust 'imposter'. That way the users would already be there. It would just be a detail like GNOME vs KDE, X11 vs Wayland, or glibc vs MUSL.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#67

Post by flohofwoe »

itishappy wrote: post #65
pif wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mental safe space of old time kernel developers? As long as they are the majority of the kernel developers, their wish is what matters the most.

Not users? Linux development is it's own reward?

Users should only need to care about what happens in user space. And the most important promise of Linux is "don't break user space". The kernel's programming language is literally just an internal implementation detail, irrelevant for Linux users.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#68

Post by commodoreboxer »

pif wrote: post #52
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is never good news that "nontechnical nonsense" causes a major maintainer to step down, regardless of Rust or not-Rust.

What was heard in the video was both technical and sensible.

The argument was "I don't want to learn Rust, I'm not going to learn Rust, and if you put a non-C language in the codebase, I'm going to break it without giving a shit". Not sensible in the least.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#69

Post by Kiro »

computerthings wrote: post #35
cogman10 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the nature of the pushback. He did a presentation on making a fs in rust, the response from this dev was "we won't be converting to your religion. We are going to continue modifying c code and your dumb rust code will always be a second class citizen." Literally just hostility for hostility sake. He wasn't proposing to rewrite everything in rust. He wasn't proposing that everyone learns rust. He was just…

What was literally said didn't include the words "always" or "your dumb rust code". From the subtitles with slight manual fixes: > I suspect part of the problem here is you're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by rust and the reality is that ain't going to happen because we have 50 plus filesystems in Linux, they will not all be instantaneously converted over to rust. Before th…

The actual quote was even worse.

Re: Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust, & why Linux is the only thing that matters

#70

Post by ragebol »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
ragebol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaning: Maybe there should be a competitor to Linux written in Rust BTW: There are a few Rust OS kernels, but none of those have the popularity of Linux of course.

Like something for mobile phones using Rust alongside a managed runtime?

Would be interesting, maybe name it after a color...

Can't find the name of that now. But there's also RedoxOS and probably several more.

Post reply on HN