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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] 2 points 4 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.