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Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this would go well for Linux.

The companies actually paying for the kernel development want Rust. That's a matter of fact.

Just see who's sponsoring the Linux Foundation, and check what they said elsewhere about their long term commitment to Rust.

The main sponsors would likely just fork Linux should Rust be removed again. Than Linux would be left with "community contributions" and the trademarks, but all the big money would go to the fork.

Of course nothing like that will happen. Because Linus knows very well where the money is coming from.

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And just how much of the Linux Foundation budget goes to supporting kernel development? What percentage of core kernel developers are paid from the Foundation? As long as Linus is happy and productive, I suspect nothing much will change.

> The companies actually paying for the kernel development want Rust. That's a matter of fact.

Okay, I've researched this quite a bit and it is totally false. Companies paying for kernel development are on older kernel versions and want certain features/fixes backported to their kernels. As of today, those backports are only supported in one language, C.

Because backporting is the same as writing drivers??

When the drivers are being written with compatibility in mind for the older kernels... yes? Would you prefer that the overworked maintainers write them twice in two completely different languages?

Look at RHEL 9. That shipped with kernel 5.14. For companies that are getting newer hardware or want capabilities that aren't available in 5.14, what do you think they would be paying for?

> The companies actually paying for the kernel development want Rust. That's a matter of fact.

This is news to me. Are there any actual grants or contracts that stipulate this? Can you provide any links to that effect?

> Just see who's sponsoring the Linux Foundation, and check what they said elsewhere about their long term commitment to Rust.

Is it the same people at these corporations? Are you assuming companies with five or six figures of employees have a unified stance on this? Or anything? If there was such a commitment to Rust, why not pull funding and cut a check to Redox? Or shift funds gradually over time? This is a head-scratching statement.

> The main sponsors would likely just fork Linux should Rust be removed again.

This is an asinine take. Three decades and millions of lines of code will not be simply forked overnight. These are the kinds of veiled threats that need to stop, especially when attached to such delusional levels of toxic wishful thinking.

Arguing in bad faith is destructive to the overall conversation.

> If there was such a commitment to Rust, why not pull funding and cut a check to Redox?

You have an existent product line running on Linux. It looks like a no brainer to just get rust into Linux so you do not have to rewrite all your userspace code to work on Redox. You can keep your own drivers as well. You can gradually migrate piece by piece.

It looks simpler to fork the existing code base than support a brand new unproven OS where you do not even know if it will perform the same as your current one. The amount of investment looks smaller with the fork but maybe I miss something.

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