Well, maybe that's exactly what should happen. Maybe rust should have never been allowed in the kernel in the first place.
It's caused a lot of trouble so far and for what? The dev community is fractured and infighting is rampant.
The "for what" seems pretty obvious, no? It's the same reason you would use Rust over C in any other project. Memory safety and more modern PL features.
And, there’s still no good and fast allocator:
Can you clarify these two sentences? You say there should be a memory-safe kernel, and then you say Rust should never have been allowed, which is the opposite.
Just because someone pushed some Rust into a kernel it does not make that kernel a Rust kernel, this is the issue with Rust community , hyping the fact that some devs managed to pushed a few lines of Rust in some kernel as some big victory.
Even Mozilla gave up on making a browser in 100% Rust, it seems that rewriting in Rust is not that easy and people like to talk then do the work.
> people like to talk then do the work.
There are tens of millions (I'm being conservative here, not sure I'd claim 100M) of Rust code running in production, at many very large tech companies. I feel like you have an opinion and are trying to fit the facts to it, rather than the other way around.
I did not say that there are not tons of millions of Rust lines of code used in production, I wish there would be a modern kernel for PCs not some micro/nano kernel for some board. I see it a big waste to push Rust into Linux or Windows kernels instead of those competent developers writing that new modern kernel, it feels like they are forced to work on Linux/Windows so they want to have fun with Rust at work. If Rust is so superior then you just need to start the kernel, prove is super fast and super safe and Big Tech will put the money so they can use it on their servers, Like why would Netflix not use the super kernel written in Rust ?
Other examples: https://tockos.org/ & https://oxidos.io/
"just" writing a production-grade Linux equivalent would take decades. Some people are working on such projects, but those will take a long time, if ever, to mature, whereas improving Linux means making positive change today. Both things can be pursued in parallel, by different people. It's not an either/or.
I honestly wish to see modern OS as a competition to the decades old Linux and Windows.
So the next paragraph means:
> Maybe rust should have never been allowed in the [Linux] kernel in the first place.
These are a Linux kernel people who want to use Rust. Writing a new kernel would be fundamentally different than working on Linux.
Also, they are “writing software,” and have been for a long time now. This isn’t just some random arguing on mailing lists, this is actual patches, with folks like Asahi and Android writing real meaningful drivers on top of it.
They may want to work on Linux but it's clear that the rest of the Linux developer community does not want to allow it, for reasons you are free to interpret as positive or negative as you see fit.
They want to write software, and they are getting somewhere, but they are restricted by the attitudes of the rest of the Linux kernel people fighting against them, so they are sucked into constant flamewars and divisive infighting. All just so they can say what they are working on is "Linux".
At the end, the question must be asked whether or not Linux and its decades of Linux/Unix baggage are worth holding back the progress represented by a kernel that is Rust from top to bottom, and written with safety and security as its top priorities from day zero instead of decades after.
Window GDI regions, CoreWrite, Drivers SDK
Android
Copilot+ PC firmware
There is no such thing.
There are people developing a complete OS in Rust: https://github.com/flosse/rust-os-comparison
There are people interested in making the Linux kernel more memory safe using Rust. And from what I am observing they aren't interested in a hard fork and are looking for collaboration.
These are different populations.
Contrary to what Theodore Ts'o is ignorantly saying, Rust is not a religion.
BTW: There are a few Rust OS kernels, but none of those have the popularity of Linux of course.
Can't find the name of that now. But there's also RedoxOS and probably several more.