I would not want someone writing kernel code who can't understand what the rest of it is doing.
I have no idea how you would measure it, but I'm assuming that C, VBScript, Perl, sed, AWK, bash, and Haskell (please don't hurt me I'm thinking about the code maintenance, time draining nightmare that is a real-world use case of mega-scaled purely functional codebases as opposed to a mixed dynamic with a purely functional core).
Curious what other languages would top the list. I'm going to assume also that some low-barrier entry scripting languages that are well designed, similar to Python, and languages that save the hypothetical, proverbial broken backs of their ancestors, like Rust, to be near the bottom of the list. I'm curious what that bottom part of the list would look like too, oddly enough. :D :))))
This is the closest I’ve ever found: http://www.knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
As the abstract of that book suggests (when referring to ego and bluster), 100% of the agile proponents I have encountered are incompetent. (This especially includes organizations that claim they are "agile").
That being said, it’s too easy to do something wrong in C. The desire to use Rust isn’t because C is stale, rather it’s too hard to write C correctly.
C is the lingua franca of the software development world.
ye ye, sure it is
uses physical pathes instead of logical namespaces for includes
average code base could be summed in such a way: everything is fucking "int" or its cousin - such a great tool for system modeling!
basic concepts as for $current_year are still non-trivial in C - like strings
when opening non-trivial codebase my VS Code goes crazy.
Maybe I do have high standards after using C# for years, but holy shit, writing Rust is 10 times better experience for me than using C.
That's the main reason to implement in Rust (the others being syntactic sugar like match, ?, and, of course, the library ecosystem that learned from ~ C++17's mistakes).
The result is codebases hard to navigate, code hard to undestand with lots of clever code and unintuitive syntax.
Rust for the Linux kernel is like 0.000001% of real life Rust use (which is not that big to begin with).
And it wouldn't be used the main kernel for the most part anyways, mostly (if not exclusively) kernel drivers.
1. I just don’t enjoy C. At this point after writing so much code “for profit” it’s no longer a hobby in itself. If I’m writing code “for purpose” I need to enjoy it!
2. While I trust myself just enough to write some C, I don’t trust everyone else to retain a strong foundation for whatever I’m building on top.
3. C has carried the Linux kernel for its first 40 years. Having used Rust it’s clear the future (while maybe not Rust) is definitely not C. I want to make a contribution that will endure the next 40 years of Linux.