> What do you think of the projects currently underway to develop OS kernels in languages like Rust (touted for having built-in safeties that C does not)?
> That's not a new phenomenon at all. We've had the system people who used Modula-2 or Ada, and I have to say Rust looks a lot better than either of those two disasters.
> I'm not convinced about Rust for an OS kernel (there's a lot more to system programming than the kernel, though), but at the same time there is no question that C has a lot of limitations.
> I spoke with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he said he'd be willing to accept a framework in the kernel for writing drivers in Rust, as long as 1) for now it wasn't enabled by default (even if you did "make allyesconfig") so that people don't need Rust to build the kernel, and 2) it shows real benefits beyond writing C, such as safe wrappers for kernel APIs.
Hmm, maybe I should have written "...for general kernel code" or "...for most kernel code", that would have been clearer.