But I guess some people just really want the unicode ukrainian flags being appended to every email they send or something and are too lazy to implement it themselves. :P
If someone suggested including a C dependency manager in the kernel, does that mean that the use of the entire C language in kernel should be discredited?
It is fair to say that the developer suggesting it (especially considering some of the proposed crates they want) has some massive misconceptions about the constraints of current Linux kernel development though.
Rust is very slowly winning (but it’s a really hard space and this is impressive). But some people have to come and try snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
(sigh)
> Other crates that I'd like: anyhow, bincode, byteorder, log, once_cell, pin-project, rand, serde, slab, static_assertions, uuid plus some more esoteric ones.
This makes Rust devs look infantile, with no real understanding of what it means to develop for the kernel. Or what it takes to develop security and performance critical software of any kind, frankly.
I don't understand why it looks bad from a performance or security point of view. These crate are well established and developed by competant devs that also care about security and performance.
Linux has its own UUID infrastructure, so it seems weird to pull in a whole parallel implementation. At the very least you'd want to disable all the generation code, and it's unclear to me if the uuid crate supports that.
rand is large. Does Linux need all the probability distributions it supports? (ripgrepping for "Bernoulli" only turns up the name of a floppy disk system, so probably not.) Doesn't it already have an implementation for the ones it does need?
I would disagree with that assertion: the kernel is a service that end user applications interact with through an API. Using anyhow in a Rust library that Rust applications use is a very bad idea. Using anyhow in the kernel might be a bad idea, but not for that stated reason.
> Linux has its own UUID infrastructure, so it seems weird to pull in a whole parallel implementation. At the very least you'd want to disable all the generation code, and it's unclear to me if the uuid crate supports that.
The uuid crate can be modified to support the kernel infrastructure as its backend. This would allow the same API to be available within the kernel and in the rest of the ecosystem. That's beneficial to everyone involved.
My thinking is that that API has to distinguish between many strictly defined error codes, while anyhow homogenizes errors and focuses on human-readable information. How would you tell whether an anyhow::Error means EINVAL or EFAULT?
It's the same fundamental design tradeoff that makes it unsuitable for Rust libraries, even if anyhow wouldn't be visible in the public API.
> The uuid crate can be modified to support the kernel infrastructure as its backend
Fair enough, using a modified version seems reasonable.
The most far-fetched crate there would be pin-project I think, because a lot of other work would have to be done to make Rust async code work in the kernel.
Pin's usefulness is not limited to async. Any type that contains a pointer relative to itself benefits from being wrapped in it to avoid accidental misuse.
infantile?
i mean, serde in the kernel is overkill, but not every crate is like that. Rust has been designed in the internet era and leverages dependencies for things older languages would ship with (rand!)
Weird justification for missing an extremely central and extraordinarily important feature…
How does rand being a crate make Rust ”internet era“ in any way?
Can you think of any reason why decoupling it from the language itself would be a good idea? Why does it need to be baked in, and what problems would arise if it was? How do these problems trade off against having people just run “cargo add rand”?
Having an boundlessly large and thoroughly unauditable trusted computing base is extremely "Internet" -- or "webscale" to be more precise.