|
|
|
|
|
|
by geofft
1794 days ago
|
|
|
Why is it a bad thing that Rust requires you to learn more things? As 'mjg59 pointed out recently, the kernel dev community intentionally asks you to learn more things unrelated to your code as a means of keeping the "bar" high and fielding only committed contributors. Isn't it all the more reasonable to ask people to learn a programming language? https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1413406419856945153 Rust isn't terribly hard to learn, especially for a kernel developer with a good understanding of C and of memory. You can pick up the basics in probably an hour. A lot of its design choices match approaches the kernel already takes (traits are like ops structs, errors are reported via return values, etc.) And Rust is a language that plenty of college students pick up for fun. Professional kernel engineers should be able to learn it just fine. Frankly the hardest thing about Rust is that it makes you think deeply about memory allocation, concurrent access across threads, resource lifetimes, etc. - but these are all things you have to think deeply about anyway to write correct kernel code. If you have a good model for these things in C, you can write the corresponding Rust quickly. In fact, learning Rust and thinking about Rust's concurrency rules has made RCU a lot easier for me to understand. RCU is famously a difficult concept, but the kernel uses it extensively and expects people to use it. So "requires little knowledge and is easy to understand" is not an existing design goal of the kernel - but having people pick up Rust might help there anyway. (Zig seems like an entirely reasonable choice too. Send in some patches! :) ) |
|
|
I'm not so sure. I program in C for a living (embedded, for almost 20 years) and believe me that I tried learning Rust, but when I see something like:
I cannot even image the knowledge code like that might require, its implication, the result, the reason why it was written like that. It's confuse. It's seems like something a trying to workaround a language limitation. Not nice at all.Source: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/blob/rust/samples/ru...