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by soulbadguy 887 days ago
> I would not advise anyone to run a Linux scheduler I wrote and tested in C. However, if I wrote and tested one in Rust, I might not feel bad letting people use it.

For something as complex and sensitive as a kernel scheduler, i think "who" wrote the scheduler (as in how much experience writing scheduler), and what software dev. practices (especially how that thing was tested) and far better predictor than just the language used. I would actually go as far as saying that the language used might not even be a predictor at all.

No amount of rust safety would prevent things like dead/locks, quadratic algorithms in weird cases, unreleased resources etc... etc...

> All this news tells us is that a Rust implementation can compare to a C implementation in this field.

That's what the news "implied", but that's not actually what the news says. And i think that's what people are trying to call out.

The dev. implemented a prototype scheduler in rust, and in a very contrive case it does better than "a" C scheduler. The implementation are probably using different algorithm, they probably making different tradeoffs, we have no idea how safe and bug free his implementation his, and not even how safe it's (how much unsafe block is in that thing).

As an exercise to show that rust is a viable language to do kernel development in term of mature tool chain and good integration with kernel API sure. But as tool to compare C vs rust for kernel dev... this is pretty much worthless.