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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I’m not insisting anything; stating C is not a memory-safe language isn’t a subjective opinion.
Note I’m not even a Rust fan; I still prefer C because it’s what I know. But the kernel isn’t written by a bunch of Lewis Hamiltons; so many patches are from one-time contributors and the kernel continues to get inundated with memory safety bugs that no amount of infrastructure, testing, code review, etc is catching. Linux is written by monkeys with a few Hamiltons doing their best to review everything before merging.
Linus has talked about this repeatedly over the past few years at numerous conferences and there’s a reason he’s integrating Rust drivers and subsystems (and not asking them to fork as you are suggesting) to stop the kernel stagnating and to begin to address the issues like one-off patches that aren’t maintained by their original author and to start squashing the volume of memory corruption bugs that are causing 2/3rds of the kernel’s vulnerabilities.
I'd say this is the issue to fix. It's not easy but if anything curl has proven it can be done efficiently.
Yeah, let's see what Bagder has to say about this:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/12/13/making-it-harder-to-do-wrong/
Memory safe language that's becoming viable ... as a proper replacement of C.
There are many other memory safe languages out there. Just not ones most would like to pull in to the kernel...
The vast majority wouldn't be able to be pulled into the kernel since they rely on the existence of the kernel via syscalls.