Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC] Rust

[Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 10:58:09PM +0000, David Howells wrote:
> Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
> 
> > I really want this to happen.  It's taken 50 years, but we finally have
> > a programming language that can replace C for writing kernels.
> 

(I'm not sure Matthew wants to rewrite the existing kernel piece in
Rust, my read is more like he feels Rust can be used for new or
experimental stuffs)

> I really don't want this to happen.  Whilst I have sympathy with the idea that
> C can be replaced with something better - Rust isn't it.  The syntax is awful.
> It's like they looked at perl and thought they could beat it at inventing
> weird and obfuscated bits of operator syntax.  Can't they replace the syntax
> with something a lot more C-like[*]?
> 

Isn't the feeling on the syntax (like, hate or can live with) really
based on personal experience? I'd rather not use this as an argument,
since I can find syntax haters for every language ;-)

> But quite apart from that, mass-converting the kernel to Rust is pretty much
> inevitably going introduce a whole bunch of new bugs.
> 

Desite whether this is what gets proposed here, I do really want to
agree with you, but I'm not able to tell whether this is an educational
prediction or unnecessary worry, since I could say the same thing for
every patchset that adds new features ;-)

To me, it doesn't matter which language wins the "best C replacement for
kernel programming" award, the lessons we learn from Rust-for-Linux will
likely apply for any other "high-level" language. Hope that we can all
agree on that it's all OK that people want to try out new stuffs and see
if they *actually* work. Because then we can discuss on something
concrete and objective.

Regards,
Boqun

> David
> 
> [*] That said, we do rather torture the C-preprocessor more than we should
> have to if the C language was more flexible.  Some of that could be alleviated
> by moving to C++ and using some of the extra features available there.  That
> would be an easier path than rusting the kernel.
> 
>