[FullGarden_S]

No?

This was never about the languages primarily though. The C programmers here would react the same way towards any other language, be it Zig or Swift, its not Rust specific. They just don't want to partake the additional headache they'll have to deal with to for making the Linux kernel more accessible to languages other than C.

Despite than, Rust devs kept on pushing it after all that was clearly stated, just to make things more and more annoying. Maintaining a software as huge and widely used as the Linux kernel is a huge responsibility that can't be relied on words like "leave it on our shoulders", especially when real time, immediate response is demanded. Development of something like the Linux kernel in Rust will be left unmaintained eventually, unless millions of dollahs are constantly invested into maintaining it because Rust is not as simple as C and the need to avoid accidental copying, memory leaks and almost all memory related issues will add more work because you can't escape "unsafe" when dealing with low level hadrware and C, making the usage of the Rust programming language for Linux kernel development utterly pointless.

[imtringued]

I somewhat disagree on the "you can't escape unsafe" part. It's true for a C+Rust project, but the idea that you need an unsafe language for low level hardware access is plain wrong. That's a "C-ism". Something that might seem true in a universe where most low level work is done in C, but wouldn't be true in a universe where C doesn't exist at all.

[steveklabnik]

At work, we have an OS written entirely in Rust. You still need unsafe to make it work. Not much (3%) but it's nonzero.

The hardware is outside of Rust's safety guarantees. This is truly a fundamental issue.

[FullGarden_S]

its fine if you disagree and think that using "unsafe language" for low level hardware access is wrong but that doesn't change the fact that the more closer one operates to the hardware, the more bare-bone they need the tools to be or else they'll only get in the way of the job. Having to worry about something like a borrow checker or a reference counter just to manipulate a couple of bytes is not an efficient way to perform low level hardware programming.

Also, there is nothing wrong with any "unsafe language". Memory safety is a skill issue, not a language issue. All functional languages are safe and procedural languages are unsafe by nature. Its better to settle on a functional language and compromise on performance if memory safety is of utmost priority. The additional complexity and performance overhead of any supposedly safe procedural language is not worth it for doing low level stuff but it sure could be a fun choice when doing high level stuff.

[f1shy]

As long as you can directly write registers, you can screw it.