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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what part of my post you are addressing.

If you had a kernel written in Rust, you would have to bring up the rust runtime environment as part of the boot process. You don't just magically get it because that's the language you used, whether it is "core" or not. You can't even execute simple functions before you have set up stack, and in this case apparently there is a constraint on stack usage. And evidently they do need a stable sort.

In any case my main point is that it's not anything to do with dependency management, not quibbling about whether or not some language could support this function at this exact point of the boot.

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> you would have to bring up the rust runtime environment as part of the boot process

Like the existing C runtime environment, this just isn't a big deal by the time we've got here. If you're the code for initialising the DRAM controller then sure, that's pretty intimidating. But this is all happening much later, we're part of an operating system, we were already loaded from disk.

> And evidently they do need a stable sort.

How so? They appear to even have a deliberate tie-breaking mechanism in their data structure, which suggests if order actually matters you're expected to specify when creating the data, not rely on stability to do what you expected.

> > you would have to bring up the rust runtime environment as part of the boot process

> Like the existing C runtime environment, this just isn't a big deal by the time we've got here. If you're the code for initialising the DRAM controller then sure, that's pretty intimidating. But this is all happening much later, we're part of an operating system, we were already loaded from disk.

I don't know what you're trying to say. The code which is written here that we are discussing is in a constrained environment where the regular kernel runtime facilities are not all available. This was cited as one of the reasons cited for open coding a very simple algorithm.

> > And evidently they do need a stable sort.

> How so?

From reading comments from patch author here.

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