Unless the problem is memory safety, probably not.
> I wish I could be more optimistic about mutter!3304 coming soon, though... it's been 5 months already, and it doesn't seem anywhere closer to being merged into main To make matters worse, patched mutter 45.5 seems to be causing use-after-free on NVIDIA's kernel driver.
In 20 years when the current crop of greybeards are dead, how many experienced c programmers with kernel experience will exist.
Rust lowers the bar for contributing and also increases the pool of programmers who can.
So… what should we reckon? Would there a difference in getting new developers into `no_std` Rust in the kernel, and how different would that be versus having people learn freestanding C, with all the kernel add-ons and nicknacks?
I would still reckon that having familiarity with the standard rust (even with std) will still have more programmers willing to make the leap than learn C for this one project.
I know of less than a handful of C projects starting in 2024, I know there is a bunch in rust , even with no_std.
I had a lot of opinions like this too when I was 17, but age and experience has disabused me of many of them.
The embedded story on Rust still has many rough edges, but it's improving every day, and I could easily see it replace C in many places, given enough time (I wouldn't be too surprised if we eventually see companies distributing a BSP that's written in Rust).
Frankly, at this point in time, I think it's foolish to start a new project in C unless you have a really good reason to do so. Many embedded systems certainly qualify as a really good reason, but I very much hope that reason diminishes over time.
Some niches maybe but most packages are ancient and the cost of supporting rust Vs the gain is massive.
There are also way less people who can write rust. This forum with the "c is bad rust is the new God" attitude is not a representation of the world.
Sure, I didn't say I agree with them, I barely remember when I was 17, it was that long ago.
I'm saying that young people that I meet are more interested in c so the 'in 20 years no-one knows c' is not exactly true.
We try Rust now and then; it's not worth it yet in my opinion for what we do. The tooling and libs we have for c are vast and like said, c people are really easy to get, Rust not so much.
I hope this changes, but for now it's just too much of a struggle to warrant it. And I was only responding to the fear of not having capable c devs in 20 years. There will be plenty.
The Expressif folks are paying someone to make sure that Rust works well on the esp32.
Not sure I agree with that. C is a very easy language to learn. The problem with it is that you have to be careful with memory management. That does take effort to learn, and I still make mistakes after writing C for over 20 years.
I love Rust, but it is a very complex language, with a complex, full-featured stdlib, and rich, sometimes-inscrutable type system. It is more difficult to learn than C, but also more difficult (and sometimes impossible) to make many of the mistakes that you can make in C.
C looks easy on the surface, but the syntax is pretty dated and full of footguns (yes even just the syntax, not even talking about UBs), and learning the language is a pretty intimidating experience because every time you think you know something, you actually don't and get bitten later.
Rust on the other hand is a good language for CS students: you have a lot of things to assimilate upfront, but when you've reached the level required to fulfill the class, you're actually ready to use it in production, and the resulting code produced by a sophomore will be more stable than C code written by wizards.
To learn the language, yes. Definitely not an easy language to learn to write production software in.
Whereas an intermediate dev can easily get Rust basic in 2-3 months and can productively contribute to the safe portion of a complex project.
The ease of writing software in a given programming language is not a linear function of the complexity of the programming language.
Very simple languages are very difficult to use. Very complex languages are very difficult to use. Languages of intermediate complexity tend to be much easier to use than those at the extremes. C is more towards the "simple" extreme than the ideal, Rust is (IMO) a bit more towards the "complex" extreme than the ideal, but is closer to the ideal than C.
It reduces the amount of help that current experienced kernel developers can give to newer developers who want to write in rust.
The kernel could have been written in assembly with macros, it wouldn't make its development any harder. The best Rust can do is not make kernel more difficult than it already is.
The best Rust can do is enforce a number of invariants which people extremely experienced in writing "trivial C" still miss every day.
Rust is technically an improvement over memory unsafe language but it also has created enthusiam among largely young and proficient coders. The ecosystem has a lot of dynamism. Drawing those people in is one of the, if not the single most important thing for the health of projects going forward with how many leaders are close to retirement.
I can't talk about 'telco grade c', because I have never experienced it. I have however seen telco submitted code to upstream kernel and its not above the average quality.