Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity

I read some of the recent submissions on the issues around C undefined behavior, which sound almost nightmarish. The common impression is "C is dangerous because it is so powerful" -- which makes it seem like an honest tradeoff, right on the Pareto frontier between those two.

But I know think a more accurate summary would be "C was designed at a time when computer architecture had not yet consolidated, and it suffers for it, leaving you with impendence mismatch between language guarantees and hardware semantics, costing both performance and safety". It seems you need a heuristic model of compiler behavior under different optimization levels to actually achieve predictable machine behavior, really the opposite of deep control!

If we are imagining a language that could stand in the place of C and deliver on that advertised promise, I would think Zig (when stable and self-hosted), not Rust. Also, it's clear to anyone following Zig that it is just plain fun! The language reference is quite entertaining, for example. And Zig Showtime is a great YT channel.

I found the following quote from the article really interesting when it comes to thinking about managing open source projects.

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Torvalds still considers that one of the building blocks of the Linux community; “just for fun,” he said, is part of what he still strives for.

It comes up when people talk about the possibility of writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. “From a technical angle, does that make sense?” Torvalds asked. “Who knows. That’s not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it.”'