Linus Torvalds Speaks on the the divide between Rust and C Linux developers an the future Linux. Will things like fragmentation among the open source community hurt the Linux Kernel? We’ll listen to the Creator of Linux.
For the full key note, checkout: Keynote: Linus Torvalds in Conversation with Dirk Hohndel
I don’t want to watch a video about it.
I’d like to know it, but a couple of sentences wouldn’t have hurt
FWIW, it’s a 9 min video and doesn’t contain anything earth shattering or easily summarized. Basically there is some friction between C and Rust devs, and Linus doesn’t think that it’s such a bad thing (there has be interesting discussion) and it’s way too early to call Rust in the kernel a failure.
1, 90 or 9 minutes, in any case it needs a speaker to be watched, and often mobile data cap when not at home.
and a fair amount of rewinds for a lot of non-native english
speakersknowersThx!
This summary seemed pretty good though.
Rust is harder to write but infinitely safer, and equivalent in speed.
It’s harder to write because it forces you to be careful.
C is easier to get a program to compile. Rust is easier to get a program working correctly.
And because it looks like C, JavaScript, Bash and a few others all mixed up together.
I’ve heard Rust described as “Rust is what you get when you put all the good features of other programming languages together. You can’t read it, but it’s freaking fast!”
why does it look like bash?
It forces you to be careful in the way it wants you to be careful. Which is fine, but it makes it a strange beastie for anyone not used to it.
Yes
But the trade off is well worth it.
It can be, sure. I prefer garbage collectors but I’m not doing systems programming.
I feel like a garbage collector would be too much a performance hit for kernel stuff.
2 things:
It’s more the determinacy, a GC randomly fires up and your systems stops for some long amount of time. There are pauseless GCs but that’s a different nightmare.
The kernel has things similar to GCs. They’re used for more specialized tasks, and some (like rcu) are absolute nightmares that have take decades to get working.
For who?
You
it’s more “it forces you to make it burrow checker friendly”.
A burrow checker is not the only mechanism to write safe code. All the mess of Rust is all because this is the strategy they adopted.
And this strategy, like everything in this world, has trade offs. It just happens that there are a lot, like, - a lot -, of trade offs, and those are insufferable when it comes to Rust…
Borrow* checker, btw
Gotta watch out for those rabbits messing with your kernel
YouTube has a transcribe feature you could use. Or you could keep scrolling if this content isn’t relevant to you.