Re: [TECH TOPIC] Rust for Linux

Alexandre Belloni
2021-07-07T13:46:13Z

On 06/07/2021 23:50:51+0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 10:47 PM Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > I strongly disagree. If we have abstractions for a particular subsystem
> > all it means that someone at some point did that work, nothing more than
> > that.
> >
> > That someone might have moved on, working elsewhere, retired, etc, and
> > those abstractions are living orphaned in the kernel.
>
> That problem is orthogonal to Rust/C. I already acknowledged that if
> you want to refactor Rust code, you will need some bare minimum Rust
> knowledge -- there is no way around that, for any language.
>
> And indeed, a second language introduces downsides like this -- this
> is also acknowledged in the original RFC.
>
> What I am saying is that, in the beginning (when most kernel
> developers are not accustomed to Rust), a solution would be that
> subsystem maintainers could step up and help those doing a refactor
> that touches their Rust code. We also discussed a bit of this in the
> original LKML discussion back in April; and we also offered ourselves
> (the Rust support folks) to help as much as we can if anybody is
> having issues on the Rust side.

So that means that if a subsystem maintainer doesn't know Rust, Rust
code should not be merge in that subsystem at all.

--
Alexandre Belloni, co-owner and COO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering