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Comment by cmpit | Hacker News Reader

7 points·cmpit··6 comments

Executive summary: "Kernel devs refused to drop everything and immediately start rewriting their code in Rust, which means that linux is inevitably doomed."

This seriously reminds me of Java zealots in worst days of Java Everywhere circus.

One good thing that would come from limiting Rust in the Linux kernel today is a clearer path to bootstrappable and reproducible builds.

GuixSD has done some amazing work on full-source bootstrapping systems using the linux-libre kernel: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

A requirement for a rust toolchain complicates this significantly and I'm not sure if now is the right time to have rust be a hard requirement.

Eventually something else will come up, after the generation that made Linux possible is gone.

Others will step in, without the values and criterias that made possible to GNU/Linux to push out UNIX, and something else will seize the opportunity.

The future? The BIOS will be another bloated electron app. your OS will load inside that App ensuring the latest chrome DRM technology to keep our kids safe. Writes/Reads to disk will be over HTTP using micro-services architechture deployed on kubernetes on your machine.

All of this will be slow, so we will have reactLike bros invent new things to speed things up like Edge Micro SSG/SSR Island Hydration Architecture and so on.

I suspect the Linux developers will just "give in" and gradually allow Rust to enter. The momentum and eagerness is quite high at the moment. It just needs one major success story and the dam will burst.

Regardless of their decision on upstream, Android Linux is taking Rust.

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