[lnsp]

I highly recommend to take the time. First, I find Bryan's presentation style very engaging and fun to watch. The short recap on language history is also quite fun. I also would not consider myself to be part of any Rust hype, but the language has sparked my interest once again.

My TLDR: Rust is a great systems language, however in-kernel C code in itself is very safe, its the ecosystem (drivers, firmware etc) around it that could benefit greatly from being rewritten in a safer language.

[kaba0]

> in-kernel C code in itself is very safe

Any citation on that? Obviously it went through numerous people hours where many bugs were reported/fixed, but afaik it still contains plenty of race conditions, and whole other areas of bugs that are just being discovered through better static analysis programs, and any future code can easily introduce new problems.

[lnsp]

It's around 0:56:12, AFAIK kernel dev has relatively strict guidelines regarding memory management. Cantrill also says that he considers the borrow checker less important if you only write code for a system that does not interact with other libraries, however as soon as you interact with others, things get messy on who owns what and when stuff should be free'd. Since the kernel is a sense a sealed system (ignoring kernel modules), the memory argument probably isn't that important anyway.

I totally agree regarding race conditions though, however I don't think Rust does anything to solve this.