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by gwbas1c 700 days ago
That's not how I interpreted it: There is a clear need to be able to write filesystems in Rust, and the kernel developer(s) who write the filesystem API don't want to have to maintain the bindings to Rust.
1 comments

They say this in almost every paragraph! For example, five of the first seven paragraphs:

> The first is to express more of the requirements using Rust's type system in order to catch more mistakes at compile time.

> Almeida showed an example of how the Rust type system can eliminate certain kinds of errors.

> … it was exactly that kind of discussion/argument that could be avoided by encapsulating the rules into the Rust types and abstractions; the compiler will know the right thing to do.

> … All of that is enforced through the type system.

> the whole idea is to determine what the constraints are from Viro and other filesystem developers, then to create types and abstractions that can enforce them.

More explicitly:

> The object lifecycles are being encoded into the Rust API, but there is no equivalent of that in C; if someone changes the lifecycle of the object on one side, the other will have bugs.

> As those changes occur, "we will find out whether or not this concept of encoding huge amounts of semantics into the type system is a good thing or a bad thing".

> In addition, when the C code changes, the Rust code needs to follow along, but who is going to do that work? Almeida agreed that it was something that needs to be discussed.

FWIW: I shipped a Windows file system driver in 2020. The api hadn't changed in years. Does Linux's API for kernel-space filesystems really change so rapidly that keeping the rust bindings up-to-date would be a considerable amount of work, in the long run?