Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
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Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#2These seem like the first features that Rust in Linux bring to the Rust language that are not almost exclusively useful to the kernel. In my perception the focus on bringing features for the kernel has held up development in other parts of the language and the standard library.
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#3> Since the talks described in this article, the work on field projection has received an update. Lossin wrote in to inform LWN that all fields of all structures are now considered structurally pinned, so projecting a Pin will now always produce a Pin or similar value.
Huh, I missed that part. It's a pretty technical point, but I'm happy they made the decision, it held up a lot of discussions.
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#4> The final design, taking inspiration from C++, would be a form of guaranteed optimization, where constructing a new value and then immediately moving it to the heap causes it to be constructed on the heap in the first place.
Note that there's some discussion about the name of that proposal, because "optimization" gives the wrong idea (that it's optional or could depend on the backend).
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#5These seem like the first features that Rust in Linux bring to the Rust language that are not almost exclusively useful to the kernel. In my perception the focus on bringing features for the kernel has held up development in other parts of the language and the standard library.
As I understand it systems programming is the priority application area for Rust, and there are plenty of projects working on OSs, embedded or other bare-metal cases, as well as interoperability with complex C codebases.
At first glance, these features look quite general to me and not particularly tied to the kernel, they are important utilities for doing this kind of programming in the real world.
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#6> The final design, taking inspiration from C++, would be a form of guaranteed optimization, where constructing a new value and then immediately moving it to the heap causes it to be constructed on the heap in the first place. Note that there's some discussion about the name of that proposal, because "optimization" gives the wrong idea (that it's optional or could depend on the backend).
How does "coalesced heap construction" or "coalesced heap allocation"?
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#7These seem like the first features that Rust in Linux bring to the Rust language that are not almost exclusively useful to the kernel. In my perception the focus on bringing features for the kernel has held up development in other parts of the language and the standard library.
I see Rust's place on low level systems programming, for everything else on userspace compiled managed languages are a much better option, systems following an architecture like Self, Inferno or Android, so I don't see a big deal with these efforts focusing on low level C like capabilities.
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#8These seem like the first features that Rust in Linux bring to the Rust language that are not almost exclusively useful to the kernel. In my perception the focus on bringing features for the kernel has held up development in other parts of the language and the standard library.
I see Rust's place on low level systems programming, for everything else on userspace compiled managed languages are a much better option, systems following an architecture like Self, Inferno or Android, so I don't see a big deal with these efforts focusing on low level C like capabilities.
> for everything else on userspace compiled managed languages are a much better option
As someone who's written a number of userspace applications in many languages as well as embedded firmwares running on bare metal, Rust is a rare gem that excels at both.
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#9> The final design, taking inspiration from C++, would be a form of guaranteed optimization, where constructing a new value and then immediately moving it to the heap causes it to be constructed on the heap in the first place. Note that there's some discussion about the name of that proposal, because "optimization" gives the wrong idea (that it's optional or could depend on the backend).
I'm probably misunderstanding the complexity of the problem, but wouldn't this be solvable by just defining the right calling convention?
"Any structures larger than x, or any structures marked with a marker type, are returned by the caller providing an outref to a buffer with correct size, and the callee directly writes the structure into that buffer."
Then you could just write normal code like
fn initialize() -> A {
// the initialization code
}
Re: Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see Rust's place on low level systems programming, for everything else on userspace compiled managed languages are a much better option, systems following an architecture like Self, Inferno or Android, so I don't see a big deal with these efforts focusing on low level C like capabilities.
> for everything else on userspace compiled managed languages are a much better option As someone who's written a number of userspace applications in many languages as well as embedded firmwares running on bare metal, Rust is a rare gem that excels at both.
Only if those userspace applications are headless, Rust exceling at GUIs is a bit of a strech.