In a candid keynote chat at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on kernel development, the integration of Rust, and the future of open source.
In a candid keynote chat at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on kernel development, the integration of Rust, and the future of open source.
Nobody is going to rewrite the entire kernel in rust. Parts of it are still written in assembler. It’s well over 30 million lines of code, 60% of it drivers. You can’t just go and rewrite that in a different language, hell it doesn’t even compile on the wrong C compiler version. You would need access to the hardware and run tests for every module you change at least or risk breaking stuff in production.
C programmers will always be around since they are necessary to keep the old code running on newer hardware. There are thousands of companies relying on the Linux and BSD kernels, for example every network router, switch etc.
I have nothing against rust, but there is always a danger of having too many programming languages used in the same project, especially if a error in one language can break something in a module written in the other. That’s just a nasty complications, especially for a time critical project like the kernel.