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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

This is as much good news for Linux as it is for Rust. In the long run, there is a nontrivial risk that Linux could be replaced by an OS written in a safer language. Moving to a safer language within Linux is likely to ensure Linux's long-term survival in smartphones and servers alike.

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The good news is that Rust is going to need to get serious about first-tier support for all architectures supported by the Linux kernel if this is to go anywhere.

This is only true depending on what you mean by "go anywhere." This is not a hard requirement for landing Rust in tree.

It is a hard requirement for Rust in things other than drivers. But that's a ways off. Walk before you run.

And LLVM, to that matter. There is gcc-rust but not sure when it will become mature enough.

There's also rust_codegen_gcc, which I'm much more hopeful about. It uses GCC as the code generation backend, but keeps the existing Rust frontend, rather than duplicating code and potentially diverging.

Your comment is the only search result for rust_codegen_gcc I can find on the Internet. Care to share a link?

EDIT: Ah, found lower in the thread: https://github.com/antoyo/rustc_codegen_gcc. The missing c was enough to make it not show up in searches.

Sorry for the name mixup; that's the right one, yes.

That project could use more contributors, if anyone is interested.

I'm not sure "risk" is the right word for it.

<rant>

I say "risk" because any such OS would probably be available under a license more permissive than the GPL. The result would almost certainly be that large parts of the OS would become proprietary (NVIDIA has already tried this with Linux's limited module support).

Of course, moving to Rust is also a risk in this respect, since the LLVM toolchain is BSD-licensed, but hopefully Rust support will be added to GCC in the not-too-distant future.

</rant>

phew, that was bothering me

Thanks, it made the rest of this whole comment section a rant.

Except of course, the GPL is why linux remains so popular. A linux killer cannot be a linux killer unless it is GPL or similar. Or else BSD would have over taken linux a long time ago.

There is 0 risk that Linux is replaced by another OS anytime soon. As if safety was a threat...

No need to wait for competition to come along before we try to do things better.

On the server side I think Linux will be replaced with something more resembling a hypervisor for WASM rather than another OS. Of course even here Linux will die at mainframe speeds if not slower. As a toolbox for IT experts it may live on forever if it doesn't calcify.

still astounds me/blows my mind to see "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" becoming prophetically true before our very eyes

Never realised this, but indeed. Javascript may very well another ActionScript; same cycle, just spread out over a longer timeframe.

Please don't replace something that works with something that doesn't.

I understand developer thoughts on this are skewed (job security, promotions, fun, etc.), but please. Don't.

C does not work any more, maybe it did 50 years in the pre-internet era, but not anymore

That's the the most idiotic assertment I've ever read, because BSD, Unix and C defined modern TCP/IP.

http://gunkies.org/wiki/4.3_BSD

Thanks to BSD 4.3 and specially BSD 4.4.

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