Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

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> No. It's all C code in the stacktrace. And kernel devs still don't have to deal with Rust, if they don't want to.

Thank you for the answer. I was wondering since the conversion to Rust is a large undertaking & rewrites can have surprises. Part of the question was if this was an argument to use Rust since NULL pointers are something that Rust goes through great lengths to guard against.

And wow...my original post got flagged? It was a sincere question that I was curious about & didn't have an answer for. Either everyone needs to chill...or is mentioning NULL pointer references in the Linux Kernel some sort of unspoken mortal sin or was I somehow offensive? Please, someone let me know if I'm out of line cause I just see zealotry of some type that I cannot begin to imagine. I want to avoid such land mines in the future...for the love of all that is holy.

> I was wondering since the conversion to Rust is a large undertaking & rewrites can have surprises.

There is no concerted effort to rewrite Linux in Rust, so there is no large undertaking. In spite of this VP9 rewrite, things are not being rewritten in Rust for the most part. Some individuals are rewriting some things but more importantly, some new stuff (such as drivers) are being written in Rust. It's this new stuff written in Rust (and not previously written in C) that is the focus IMO.

And most C stuff isn't going to be rewritten. Many maintainers don't know Rust and couldn't review Rust code anyway. The impact of Rust in the kernel so far is pretty modest (the most important code being the driver for Apple silicon GPUs, I think)

> And wow...my original post got flagged? It was a sincere question that I was curious about & didn't have an answer for. Either everyone needs to chill...or is mentioning NULL pointer references in the Linux Kernel some sort of unspoken mortal sin or was I somehow offensive?

I didn't flag your post, but I would guess it was flagged because you immediately assumed that Rust was to blame.

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