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Is there an easier way forward for rust in linux?
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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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I dont think that there is another way. They are gonna have to coexist with the old guard. The problem is, they are both right. Rust is the better language, its basically made for this task, but C runs everywhere, it has a much larger userbase, and introducing a second language into a huge low level program like Linux will make it much, much harder to maintain.
Why would you say that Rust is made for low level hardware interfacing? I am generally curious.
I was only alluding to the fact that its a low level language like C, but with a more modern design and safety features, not anything specific, sorry!
I once heard that a major problem is that you have to disable or work around Rusts safety features once you write hardware interfacing code like a os kernel
Not really. While working at the OS-level can typically require 'unsafe' operations a core tenet of writing Rust is making safe abstractions around unsafe operations. Rust's 'unsafe' mode doesn't disable all safety checks either - there are still many invariants that the Rust compiler enforces that a C compiler won't, even in an 'unsafe' block.
And even ignoring all of that, if 10% of the code needs to be written in Rust's 'unsafe' mode that means the other 90% is automatically error-checked for you, compared with 0% if you're writing C.
Rust, IMO, provides a set of convenient features (borrow checker, RAII, generics, sane operator overloading, opt in unsafety) while leaving out ones that get pretty invasive and are hard to use in an embedded context (exceptions, new/delete operators, GC).