this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 day ago by SleafordMod@feddit.uk to c/technology@lemmy.world
56 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Greg Kroah-Hartman... urged fellow contributors to embrace those interested in contributing Rust code to improve the kernel.

"Adding another language really shouldn't be a problem... embrace the people offering to join us

Thoughts on this?

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

True. We should have both better tooling and better languages. Someone posted this thread with Greg KH, which has this gem:

The majority of bugs (quantity, not quality/severity) we have are due to the stupid little corner cases in C that are totally gone in Rust. Things like simple overwrites of memory (not that rust can catch all of these by far), error path cleanups, forgetting to check error values, and use-after-free mistakes. That's why I'm wanting to see Rust get into the kernel, these types of issues just go away, allowing developers and maintainers more time to focus on the REAL bugs that happen (i.e. logic issues, race conditions, etc.)

I'm all for moving our C codebase toward making these types of problems impossible to hit, the work that Kees and Gustavo and others are doing here is wonderful and totally needed, we have 30 million lines of C code that isn't going anywhere any year soon. That's a worthy effort and is not going to stop and should not stop no matter what.

But for new code / drivers, writing them in rust where these types of bugs just can't happen (or happen much much less) is a win for all of us, why wouldn't we do this?

In short, let's do both.