Rust in Linux Revisited
drewdevault.com
drewdevault.com
The language isn't the problem, it's the architecture. In Linux, all of the drivers run with the rest of the kernel. A bad driver can take down the whole thing, or perform arbitrary badness.
In Drew's own Helios microkernel, the architecture is right, and it's ready to have folks start piling on drivers in user-space. Those drivers can be written in pretty much any low level language that can produce ELF binaries.
It's surely a better path forward to slap a Linux syscall API on top of Helios + some new drivers than to clone the whole linux system architecture in another programming language. At least then, we would have gained something tangible (drivers can't ruin the kernel). Instead of having another Linux written in a different language, with all the same design flaws.
It’s important because static analysis tools get nowhere near the coverage of a memory safe language.
Static analysis can find bugs but it cannot prove their absence. A memory safe type system proves absence. Rust’s type system proves absence module uses of unsafe, which is still much better than what any C static analysis could do.
(I am saying this as a Rust hater who’s trying to obviate the need for it.)
> The language isn't the problem, it's the architecture. In Linux, all of the drivers run with the rest of the kernel. A bad driver can take down the whole thing, or perform arbitrary badness.
This is a case of “why not both”.
Sure, you can harden an OS by compartmentalizing. And you can also harden using memory safety. As time goes on, folks will do both. The fact that you could (and should) do one of these things is not an argument to not do the other.
It’s hard for me to believe a HN reader would not know this, especially given there are regular exploits revealed in the kernel.
It'd be nice to be able to say, "We're pretty sure these source code files don't contain any null pointer dereferences, array out-of-bounds errors, use-after-free errors, double frees, or (if the kernel rust project fully embraces the Rust way of doing concurrency, I'm not familiar with the technical details) race conditions, because otherwise it wouldn't have compiled." When absolutely necessary, unsafe code blocks can provide a back door around some of these checks, but as long as the unsafe code blocks are relatively small, it's a much smaller surface area for these kinds of bugs to show up.
Not to mention the type system is in some ways much more user friendly. Proper algebraic types are easier than trying to cobble something ad-hoc together with tagged unions.
> or why Drew is so sympathetic to the cause.
He's not, he's suggesting in the most polite and diplomatic way possible that he thinks they should stop what they're doing, and do something else instead that kernel maintainers don't have to deal with.
I think this is a mischaracterization. If you read the original post[1] it's clear he's not at all sympathetic to the cause, though given recent news he is more sympathetic to the people who have the cause (even if he thinks it's misguided).
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/10/03/Does-Rust-belong-in-Linux...
All the praise is just nerdstroking to soften the kernel of the argument that they are working on the wrong thing.
The fact of the matter is that politics was always going to be difficult, and for all of the respect and admiration I have for the Rust-for-Linux team -- which I do have, thank you -- I am equally sympathetic to the kernel hackers who didn't ask for this project on their doorstep, and for their own needs to be accommodated. I condemn the toxicity that has bubbled up in this process, from C hackers and Rust hackers alike, but even absent that toxicity I think that the political challenges of Rust-for-Linux are enormous and distract from the fundamental work of the project.
People have burnt out and quit the project, and you cannot erase their experience when it questions the viability of the project. I'm offering them compassion and a different path that might celebrate their work without leading to burnout. People having burnt out and quitting the project is a historical fact, and not my fault, even if I'm the easy polemic for you to pin the blame on. I think it'd be a fucking shame if they quit pursing their passions for OS development in Rust over it and I've said as much and that's more than I can say for you and everyone else filling my messages with personal attacks and bad faith reading of everything I have to say.
I'd rather fix the abuse (the cause of the particular burnout), because it impacts not only the Rust developers, but all current and future contributors, and indirectly us users as well.
In a metaphorical sense… since HN is not your inbox and this is not your submission.
Except maybe a fork where oxidation proceeds much faster, sponsored by a large corporation with bespoke hardware they can develop for and interest in security. Cloud OS-es or Android maybe.
That's exclusively seL4 right now, and the very state of the art.
(incidentally, we really should be putting our weight behind seL4, it really is good)
The BSDs, Solaris/Illumos, and Windows all have tried, some more than once even. I think there have been at least 4 Linux kernel ABI compatibility layers for those OSes. They've all failed. And all future attempts will fail too for the same reason:
The Linux kernel ABI is not
specified anywhere, and it's
insanely large (and growing).
To top it all off that undefined (but stable) ABI is a moving target: it's always evolving / getting extended.
The only thing you have to help you is that whatever the ABI, Linux [mostly] commits to maintaining backwards compatibility with it. If your compatibility ever gets good enough, that will help you, but in the meantime you'll be chasing a never ending and ever growing ill-defined ABI.
Good luck with that!
See https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/components/v2/starn... and https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s...
curl -s "https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/HEAD/scripts/boot..." | base64 --decode | bash
curl -s "https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/HEAD/scripts/boot..." | base64 --decode | bash
Go and dart are basically gone from the system as well. Go is only used in the legacy netstack which has been displaced by one written in rust, and is otherwise only used in host tools for building fuchsia. I believe dart is almost gone, with a few remnants left in the form of build tools. Flutter does support fuchsia (and that is dart), but that support is not maintained in a fuchsia repo.
Source: I work on fuchsia.
You do not become a BSD or illumos developer because you are interested in replicating Linux.
OTOH, I also recognize sometimes it is really that bad and going your own way is the best thing to do. But I think Linux isn't at that position yet.
>but I will always wish people can just stop fighting, and work together.
Two separate ideas are conflated here.
It would make me happy if they stopped fighting, and instead worked separately on their C and Rust kernels respectively.
The most prominent one is supportive of Rust. And traditionally when it comes to technical decisions, it is his opinion that matters most.
It is the premise. Without his acceptance of Rust, we wouldn't be at this point.
But he can't realistically do the relevant rust-accommodation work all by himself.
Not does he seem supportive of Rust enough as to replace the top maintainers he trusts and has worked with for a very long time with those that will extend the red carpet for Rust developers.
Perhaps Linus was trying to be kind. But sometimes, just saying "No." is most kind.
He didn't have the luxury of hindsight. He tried to be accommodating. Now, we are in a situation that is not pleasant for anybody involved.
So saying yes to Rust, or to some other language that is not filled with foot guns and could also work in the kernel space, is not only a matter of kindness but a matter of long-term strategy for the kernel.
I agree. But likewise, Linux's design is far from the state of the art. Maybe there's value in letting it be what it always has been. It is not realistic to try to migrate millions of LoCs written with poor structure, to properly structured Rust, with barely any support from the pre-existing developers.
At some time, it makes sense to move on to something better. This hypothetical system be written in a different language. It could be Rust, it could be C23, or something else entirely. But what it will definitely be is better structured. It would have clean, versioned APIs. And drivers will no doubt run in user space.
But the argument being made is that Linux is particularly ill suited for an in-place conversion to a better design.
"supportive" is not a binary.
Interpreting "no immediate objections" as "this is what I want" is specious and intellectually dishonest.
All the Rust kernel developers have to know C. Is that true of the bigger maintainers who are arguing against it?
It’s fine to prefer one over the other.
If you haven’t learned one and refuse to try it and your argument boils down to “it’s not what we’ve done and I don’t want to change” that’s not good technical decision making.
It sounds reasonable - you don't waltz into a large existing project $FOO and tell the existing maintainers "Here's our rules going forward - you shall learn $BAR!"
It's both rude and arrogant.
I have not seen any good arguments for why there should be an exception when $BAR == Linux and $FOO == Rust.
How many times has this succeeded for fundamental work? I can think of a couple, including Xorg and GCC. I don't know if those cases can be characterized as "grudges" exactly but, in each instance, someone was unsatisfied with the prevailing conditions, forked the work, and then subsumed the legacy.
Doubtless there have been far more failures than successes. I also know that computing probabilities based on such ratios is simple minded: other factors exist and the equation is non-linear.
> But I think Linux isn't at that position yet.
I was disturbed by the irrational behavior I saw in this talk[1]. What the presenter sought was reasonable: communicate the intended semantics so Rust kernel developers can track the evolution. This was somehow understood as: forego C and become a Rust programmer, take responsibility for our work and maintain it going forward.
No, I do not believe the former implies the latter. There are endless silos, both formal and informal, for both good reasons and bad reasons, permeating all intellectual work, whether "open" or not. It is entirely reasonable to imagine that this pattern can be employed among reasonable people for the matter at hand, especially for something like file systems, where even parallel implementations can and do exist simultaneously.
If this behavior is prevalent enough then drastic steps are justified. Whether they're feasible or not is another matter, and also a many factored, non-linear calculation. One could, for instance, reimplement only some fraction of the kernel and be entirely sufficient for most of the backend cloud server Linux use case. Given the enthusiasm for Rust among major cloud operators, I suspect this might be attempted at some point.
That's how I understand it as well: the proposal is
1. Put our Rust code in.
2. If you make C-code changes that break Rust-code, then your change can't be merged until you either learn Rust or wait on us to fix things.
This is an unreasonable expectation, IMO, for any large project written in any language; this is not specific to Linux and C and Rust.
Making unreasonable proposals in civil language does not magically turn that proposal into a reasonable one.
Pressing forward in spite of feedback that the proposal is unreasonable is uncivil, even if you spread a thin veneer of civility over it.
I question the basis of the reaction and find it wanting. Paraphrasing now; "50 filesystems won't be instantaneously converted to Rust." Has anyone, anywhere suggested such a thing? I don't think anyone credible has done so. A strawman argument. The accusation of some forced conversion to a new "religion" is also baseless, not to mention insulting.
An aside: the get_or_create_inode method example that was left on the display for nearly half the presentation is very compelling to me. It is explicit and comprehensive: one can trivially comprehend both the likely implementation of the method and the obligations of the caller without reading a line of code beyond that declaration. Practically self documenting and vastly superior to conventional systems programming C. At one point a speaker likened this to Java, I suppose because of the type composition. That's ignorant and false: that signature conveys so much more value than what one sees in typical Java code that it's not in the same ballpark at all. The verbosity has actual value.
Rust is great; a legitimate advance in systems languages. People are compelled by it. That has produced some conflict. Not all conflict is avoidable or inherently evil. The C side of this conflict will need better tactics if they're not going to just devolve into irrationality with false claims, baseless accusations and hysteria.
The "C side" don't need any tactics; it's their project and they are free to refuse entry of some other group of people.
They can make false claims, they can make baseless accusations and they can throw hysterics all they want to, because they don't have to convince anyone of anything.
The Rust side has to provide an argument more compelling than "you are using inferior tools", because even if true, it's irrelevant!
The Rust side has to do the convincing here, not the C side.
Also, I don't believe the "C side" has the degree of control over all of this that you hypothesize. The Linux BDFL isn't anti-Rust, and he is endowed with an inhuman degree of wisdom that will likely prevent him from supporting irrational C dogmatists. The acceptance by Linus of a possible future that included Rust in the kernel is the start of all of this. He knew then the road would not be trouble free; he's been calling these kinds of shots for too long to imagine otherwise.
Rust is many things, but devoid of political drama it is not.
It's naive grandstanding in the best of cases, and malicious proselytizing in the worst.
A Linux kernel clone is the epitome of a large Rust community project (for many reasons, some noble, some not so noble). It would likely pull in hundreds if not thousands of developers in an arms race assuming the end goal is well defined.
Nobody claims it's a small task, but I believe it can probably be accomplished. Particularily in the scope of the original claim "applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years."
Now I'm not saying I agree, but his premise was a Linux-compatible kernel, which Redox most definitely is not. Redox explicitly does not intend to be POSIX, has its own custom (in-house) filesystem, desktop environment, and is a microkernel as well. A better comparison for Redox would be Hurd, not Linux.
Or, the original claim: How small a team, and how quickly?
Sure, the Linux development process was inefficient. There were a lot of false directions and dead ends and things that were OK ideas but were superseded by better ideas. If you know the destination, you can drive straight there without all the wandering around.
But, fine, how inefficient was the development process? 90% wandering around? It probably wasn't 99% wandering around. So you're going to need something like 10% of the man-hours that went into Linux.
You say Rust is more productive? How much more? Maybe a factor of two? OK, you need 5% of the man-hours that went into Linux, over the last 20+ years.
That's still not a small team and quickly, no matter how you slice it.
I’m extrapolating but this would hardly be “misrepresenting” his position.
I very much took his argument as an open-source project with a small number of leaders, with the help of the larger OSS community, could make a mature subset of a Linux compatible kernel in a small amount of time (years)
> A kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment
---
> 1. Security:
> Nanos aims to be a much more secure system than Linux. It does this through several thrusts. Not having the notion of users, running a single process per vm, and limiting the amount of code that is incorporated into each vm.
> 2. Minimalist:
> KISS. As Nanos is not intended to be ran on bare metal we strive to keep the core as simple as possible.
---
They patched erlang and gpu-nvidia to work with Nanos
---
A product based on Nanos
Also your estimate for AAA game development is massively optimistic, AAA team sizes are in the hundreds today (not a good thing for quality and innovation, but that's how it is).
The very loud Rust (and toxic) community could maybe spare in average 1$ a month each.
Why/how are they toxic?
Not trying to stoke arguments, just a curious person thinking of learning Rust for fun with less drama.
I find Golang community to be less opinionated and just chill + pumping out libs, modules, projects, products. I like that. Less drama more output.
But I'm curious to pick on Rust as well.
1. Rust fanboys poping up on other language topic and shitting on them and promoting Rust
2. Ton of low quality promotion, like you would get on HN crap like TODO application in Rust, and the Rust community would just upvote and promote this low level 1 weekend project just because is Rust
3. RIR rewrite it in rust, toxic Rust fans would popup on projects communities and demand to rewrite it in rust, or why is this not in Rust, or I would contribute if you rewrite it in rust.
I am not sure why this community is so toxic, I do not remember Java,Python to have this problem, I suspect that the toxic part is just a portion of the developers but the community of Rust devs did not manage to keep the toxic people in check.
But honestly use a search engine and find more details, I am avoiding this kind of drama so I do not have latest gossip (just seen a link here that the ladybird devs also called the Rust people toxic , probably because they are butt hurt that people are making a more popular browser then their Rust alternatives)
It's a very polite, high-effort, superficially humble piece of writing, that nevertheless boils down to "You guys should probably leave us alone and work on stuff we don't need to worry about".
Now, working on a Linux fork as a "proof of value" thing could be interesting, but it also means that this hypothetical Linust project would be stuck forever chasing Linux's API decisions without any power to influence them (and, if recent history is any indication, quite a lot of hostility from OG Linux maintainers).
I can't help but notice that Drew's plan doesn't include any exit strategy, any point where the projects merge or Linux starts taking components from Linust or something.
Maybe Drew thinks that forever being stuck between shadowing a concurrent project's API and trying to convince its billion users to switch to yours instead is an attractive prospect. If I was a Rust-on-Linux developer, I'd find that patronizing.
If Rustnux is safer and more performant in the ways that Rust advocates believe it will be, Rustnux will gain traction and demonstrate the potential benefits of Rust in the kernel itself. This is intrinsically beneficial, and I'm unsure how convincing a billion people to switch has anything to do with it. (Also, bizarre metric, does every purcharser-of-an-IoT-thermostat get their choice of OS kernels?)
For those who don't want to work on "shadowing" an API (quick, someone tell the Wine crowd they're 'stuck' and should stop), Redox already exists. He's not saying to shut it down. For a bunch of people accusing Drew of being incurious, these some some aggressively 'in the box' takes.
No, they are just different things. Linux is what people use. It would be nice to be able to write drivers in Rust for the system people use. It's a very practical desire to want to use Rust and Linux to build real systems, right now, instead of having to choose one or the other.
I feel like people have some kind of misconception about what OSS requires on this point. The only meaningful right you have with the Linux kernel, that you don't have with - say - NT, is the right to fork it. Nothing about the idea of OSS extends you a right to merge whatever code you want into someone else's project to satisfy your 'very practical desires'.
You could have the best idea of all time, and you still wouldn't have any rights to anyone else's OSS project other than forking it.
Drew is offering a practical solution here to all sides, and all that the critics can come up with is 'yeah but wouldn't it be nicer if they got along?' (it would! they don't) or 'I hate Drew', which is an irrelevant and cruel thing to say about an actual human being.
Never said it did?
> Nothing about the idea of OSS extends you a right to merge whatever code you want into someone else's project to satisfy your 'very practical desires'.
And that's why I called them practical desires, not rights?
> Drew is offering a practical solution here to all sides, and all that the critics can come up with is 'yeah but wouldn't it be nicer if they got along?' (it would! they don't)
My solution is to first deal with the bad behavior or it will fester. Then I'd ask if the technical reasons for including Rust in the Linux kernel still hold. I think they do. So I'm not sure we've reached the point where a fork makes sense yet. If we forked every time a kernel dev acted nasty to others, we'd have far too many forks.
> or 'I hate Drew', which is an irrelevant and cruel thing to say about an actual human being.
That's not what I said. If anyone is curious, I address this elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407312
As to why I really can't stand Drew's writing, which is at the core of this complaint, one might see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404644
"Fine I'll do it myself" is a story basically as old as time.
- Walt Disney
- Ferruccio Lamborghini
- King Henry VIII
- Juan Pujol Garcia
Doing anything on Linux is many times as hard as doing it on systems that put a strong emphasis on structure. This is true not just for microkernel, multiserver systems, but for other unices/unix-like such as the BSDs (which put far more emphasis on structure relative to Linux) as well.
Thus, I agree entirely with Drew, with extra reasons, that we (developers in general, not specific to rust) should try and put some effort elsewhere than Linux.
It doesn't have to be Linux. It isn't the end-all in operating systems. It's just what happens to be most popular -right now-.
That's part of the problem, I think: The Rust group's primary goal appears to be increasing the usage and/or popularity of Rust, not merely hardening the Linux kernel.
After all, both the kernel devs as well as the Rust group knows very well that the Rust group can maintain out-of-tree patches indefinitely. By using a out-of-tree patch, they can slowly and effectively replace almost all of the drivers. Many people actually would download and use their `rustix` kernel.
But that doesn't allow them to achieve their goal of spreading the movement, hence their resistance to prove the concept out-of-tree and the pushback from kernel devs who see this purely as a popularity-booster.
There is no good argument against the Rust group proceeding with an out-of-tree development effort; all the ones around "it's too much work" reflects the fear that the kernel devs have that the Rust group would push Rush code into the kernel, and then not be around to maintain it when some C code breaks it.
Heavy survivorship bias in your list of examples, though.
And maybe you're right and some Rust-based UNIX will eventually outcompete Linux.
But it'll be a shame if it gets that far because one community distrusted the other so much it would rather sneer at them like you're doing and tell them to piss off than put any investment whatsoever into sharing work.
After leaving Fuchsia and reflecting on the whole thing, I really believe that despite the many problems Linux may have over the long term, the only viable strategies for a broadly and practically usable safer OSS system are either: someone donates at least $2bn to get it done in a PBC well managed and focused over a decade, or you slowly mutate Linux into that thing. Anything drastically different is, for now, dependent on the world being a different shape / people & companies having different attitudes than they do. I'd love to see something like Redox prove me wrong, but real world experience suggests that's extremely unlikely. RISCv is the one thing in flight that might "change the shape of the world" enough to alter this, but RISCv comes with it's own stack of long challenges to overcome to meet the originally stated goal of broadly and practically usable.
Writing a core kernel and usable userspace isn't something to be trivialized, but by cost and work volume, getting a broad set of drivers is far far more effort by an astronomical margin. The OSDev community has thousands of OSes to explore, and barely any drivers that do things a user actually cares about.
This 1000%
Working with 9front has showed me that open source hardware mostly isn't. You're at the mercy of the hardware manufacturer who's only commitment to open source is a Linux kernel full of drivers you can't understand because there's no hardware manual. That or you have to be a corporate partner with licensees and NDA's which is a massive wall for little projects and individuals. This effects EVERY alternative OS to Linux.
It's disheartening as it makes Linux into an unwitting tyrant as you have no choice but to use Linux or find another SoC that provides docs.
I don't think RISC-V will have any effect on the availability of drivers.
Such drivers would require little maintenance and would thus be much more valuable than Linux drivers.
They would be free from the insanity that is Linux's lack of internal structure.
Now this compassionate revisit offers the same conclusion: don’t do Rust in Linux.
This person read that email about one Rust Kernel developer resigning because of burnout. Now he goes into how the Linux project is a “burnout machine” and how his heart goes out to the “developers who have been burned” (how did we get to plural?).[1]
The “so where do we go now?” almost gets ahead of itself before it says in the next paragraph that “the path is theirs to choose”. Well yeah because the only person who implied there was a crossroads is the author here.
The predictable conclusion is to abandon the project and do something adjacent to the Linux Kernel. But what if you cared about working on the Linux Kernel specifically? What if you cared about the code in the Linux Kernel itself, its long term health… hush, hush now. You are burned out and don’t know what you are saying.
The penultimate paragraph then declares that the Rust-for-Linux project itself is “burned out” (“and that’s awful”).
Who needs enemies with compassionate friends like this.
[1] How often do we read about maintainers suffering burnout? Every day? Do we then declare that the project is a failure, even when there are other maintainers left on the project?
There are several Rust-for-Linux folks who have complained about the same things and been at various levels of burned out over the course of the project. Ignoring them because it raises uncomfortable questions regarding the viability of the project doesn't make it go away, it just erases their experiences.
>The “so where do we go now?” almost gets ahead of itself before it says in the next paragraph that “the path is theirs to choose”. Well yeah because the only person who implied there was a crossroads is the author here.
>The predictable conclusion is to abandon the project and do something adjacent to the Linux Kernel.
This article is in response to someone who already decided to abandon the project, and to suggest what's next. I didn't impose the conclusion to abandon it on anyone, and in fact I explicitly supported it if burnout victims choose to return to the fold.
Yes, I stand by the conclusion that Rust-for-Linux is probably not a great idea, and I'm allowed to say that without being anyone's "enemy". I also believe people when they say they're burned out and quitting the project and take their needs seriously, something I think is missing from your comment. All of this is compatible with compassion. I'm not and have never been your enemy: I can say that I think it's not a good idea and wish you well in your efforts nevertheless, and I have.
It wasn't even because of burnout.
Just seems like a lot of groundwork is still being laid, without much even having been started.
The article makes it seem like things are actually being rewritten in rust.
Are they?
Linus seems reasonable in comparison…
Are these people just users with a strong opinion about what language their kernel uses? If they're Rust devs and reflective of how popular Rust is in general, where are all of the killer apps written in Rust? Why do Rust programmers seem to mostly just produce partial, feature-incomplete rewrites of Unix utilities?
What like Ripgrep, uv, Rustdesk, Deno, Tauri, Zed, Meillisearch, Typst, Nushell...?
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20231101-rust-binder-...
also pretty fun to think that beos will continue to secretly live on deep in the guts of linux powering android, even in rust!
Shipped by Fedora. Used on all Apple Silicon Macs running Linux.
The value exists and has been proven. The community can say no to it, but dismissing the work of Lina and the Asahi team members who have worked on Rust stuff as a “toy project” is just being rude.
Requirement that unless required by existing code, C and C++ are deprecated for new projects on Azure Infrastructure team, Rust or compiled managed languages (C#, Java, Go) are the official ones for new projects.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/ph...
MR where they are working though a build system issue: https://gitlab.com/cki-project/kernel-ark/-/merge_requests/3...
I think there’s a parable in the Bible about this one:
No one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved.
He was specifically talking about bringing new paradigms to an old system. Sometimes, it’s just easier to start over. It has been my experience in programming that starting over almost always yields better results, but it does take time.
That’s why apples m1 was so successful. They took the time to rebuild just for apple. But it was 100% worth it.
This sounds very easy. Very.
https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/113052127771211132
What he did though, he developed a Unix clone using hare in roughly 30 days.
There is an ocean between that and being an expert in Linux internals.
Oh, and the original UNIX was done in one week by one guy.
What this brings to light is the ability to compare Helios (microkernel) and Unix clone development, or how it was said in the post: reimplementing already existing design vs designing something new.
Because of this, I think his statements carry some weight.
It's not a bad idea, imho. Rust folks love rewriting things, and are often quite good at it. It would keep both the curmudgeonly kernel Never-Rusters and the Rust evangelism brigades happy (by keeping them apart). And it's a great proving ground for Rust's claims - assuming licence compatibility, successful rewrites of individual components could be lifted by Linux down the line.
1. While the Linux guy mentioned here is not a great politician and his rant was pathetic, his technical argument was sane. You can put months into creating the perfect data model for your Rust implementation but Linux have a habit of completely changing things every year or so. That would make Rust the bottleneck of Linux development
2. These "hugely talanted" Rust devs are competing with ten times more talented Linux devs on their home turf.
My point is, stop creating drama. This task requires hard work and compromises.
The real question is will you even bother to do it? Will it matter at that point?
Ladybird is all C++ though a somewhat unique dialect of it.
Servo is a browser engine written in Rust.