| > I'm not the first one lamenting the lack of experimentation in CS. See ... Take your first IEEE paper's abstract: "Empirical software engineering research needs research guidelines to improve the research and reporting processes." They are pointing out problems with the empirical research that is being done, not claiming "almost complete lack of empiricism in Computer Science" as you did. There are issues in all science fields, their research, their statistics and their reporting, in particular outside their major journals (and not even those are infallible). Calling out an entire science field in particular is quite insulting to all their researchers. > I know, but it doesn't contain (empirical) evidence. Empirical evidence of what? Please do not remove/ignore parts of my reply to suit your argument. You may claim that you would prefer the RFC to include references to papers and articles; but you cannot claim the evidence does not exist ("99% or so of all new tech can't demonstrate any benefits") or that an entire field has no clue ("the almost complete lack of empiricism in Computer Science"). > That's the medical equivalent of giving the patient an unknown drug to see what happens. Did the patient get better? Maybe it was the drug! Did the patient get worse? Maybe it was not the drug! No, it is not equivalent, because we are not unconditionally adding Rust into the kernel (much less "rewriting it" as you claim). In fact, one is free to have a C and a Rust version of the same driver and compare whatever metrics you need. Even the RFC contains such an example and I am aware of at least one company doing precisely that. Moreover, Rust is not an "unknown language" in the sense of an "unknown drug". On the contrary: it was explictly designed to address some issues such as memory-safety. > A better way could be to fork a less-visible (but still well-maintained) C project and rewrite it in Rust. If the defect rate over time is significantly lower than for the upstream C project then that is empirical evidence in support of a Linux rewrite in Rust. Not really, because 1. you would need to show the same results would apply to the Linux kernel and 2. we are not rewriting the kernel in Rust. > Running such an experiment would take a lot of time and effort, but that is no excuse for not doing it. As mentioned, I am aware of at least one company running an even better experiment than the one you propose. If you want faster results, then you will need to put money into it yourself. |