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Is there an easier way forward for rust in linux? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Every week or so there seems to be drama about some old dude shouting about how rust in the Linux kernel is bad. Given all the open hostility, is there easier way for R4L to continue their work?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Why would you say that Rust is made for low level hardware interfacing? I am generally curious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

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.