Does the compilation time bother anyone?
2010. I needed to do so for my Linux Kernel university class.
It took 8 hours on this piece of junk Pentium 4 I found in the school's e-waste bin. You know those Black Dell Optiplex machines that were everywhere like a plague.
They were days of such stress but also so much bliss.
Especially if you had some crap P4 that made modern gaming laptops look well-circulated.
1. "Nobody compiles a kernel these days". Sure, maybe not for daily use for most, but lots of people do for work and experimentation. Also, Gentoo.
2. "Everybody runs a modern CPU". Plenty of people still run decade-old hardware, and even older, because it works and in that decade objectives of PC have not significantly changed, so why would hardware?
This driver is almost certainly not targeting 10 year old hardware.
So when you define your kernel config, you wouldn't include this driver. The new code would be entirely skipped over at compile time.
(Still think "rewrite everything in rust to solve all our problems" is a bit dumb.)
On the other hand, the Rust language team should do their utmost to improve the speed of their compiler.