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Comment by tcmart14 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe to try to answer some of OP's question. Rust is past it's "1.0" release. Other alternatives are also plenty viable and I would love to see more technical conversation considering them, but I think Rust is viewed as more mature (not a 'Rust' user here). An example, I find Zig really interesting. However, I think even the main creator of Zig says it is not production ready yet (however it is getting closer to that '1.0' release). D may be the only one I know (besides Ada) that has that level of maturity.

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Also, for people who hate memory safety issues, does it really matter which language? Rust is a solution with momentum. For the people motivated by that concern, fighting over language choice is a distraction.

Not necessarily. Language does matter as it is a construct that forms how problems are thought about. One thing I like about D is how it is much more multi-paradigm. I would like to see some more analysis of using D in Linux.

For user land it doesn't matter at all as people can mix and match whatever languages they want as long as there is an ELF entry point into the runtime. However rewriting the kernel, which is what this discussion is about, is a whole other matter.

Userland is worth fighting for too. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/authorization.png

But as bawolff said, the main issue is moving towards safer tech. If Ada had good enough momentum, we'd be discussing Ada in the kernel instead. C++ has been rejected from Linux, leaving Rust as the only kernel-capable language with enough momentum, so Rust it is.

> Userland is worth fighting for too. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/authorization.png

That has nothing to do with memory safety though let alone Rust specifically. What we need is a smarter way to manage authentication (non-persistent session cookies and usage a password manager to handle the log in is a step in the right direction).

We are stuck in a local minima with C and C++. Rust is a particle with high enough energy to tunnel through the barrier to a lower, safer energy level.

To some degree, it doesn't matter how Rust acquired the energy; if you want to hop the gap, gotta hitch a ride on the highest energy wave.

I'm not sure that's fair because most of alternatives suggested, eg OCaml, D and Ada, are all a hell of a lot more mature than Rust.

As much as I like OCaml, I doubt we'll ever see a tracing garbage collected language in the Linux kernel.

Also neither OCaml nor D make any attempts at stopping data races, which is sort of a selling point of Rust. Ada/SPARK, I suppose do, but I don't know at what cost; I'm sure though Rust syntax will feel more familiar to C developers than Ada, even if a lot of Rust syntax comes from ML. But it has {} :).

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