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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

I am sure why people are so terminally online to care about this. Like Rust for Linux is also here to stay and we can expect that in 10-20y a large portion of the kernel will be in Rust. Obviously the post was boasting, it was meant as a recruitment ad. They actually probably got a few decent candidates from it.

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Adding rust to the kernel makes sense. Porting a million lines of code per engineer month is insane, regardless of language (it works out to ~600ms per line total, including review, testing, etc). Anyone who heard about that expectation and thought it sounded good is the opposite of decent candidate.

What makes it inevitable?

Good question, it’s not. You're responding to just another Rust and/or LLM fanatic claiming they can predict the future. Dime a dozen on this board.

Hey let’s not put the Rust fanatics in the same bucket as the LLM bros. One is a safe programming language, the other is an overgrown lorem ipsum text generator. We’re not the same :)

The fact that you’re both getting lumped in the same shill bucket together should give you pause.

Yes, I paused to comment and moved on

I will that the Rust fanatic mantle thank you very much. Check your sources though [1]. I dont predict the future I just listen to Linus.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

Sorry to burst your bubble but it takes more than Linus to make Linux.

I suspect you wouldn't be saying that if he had agreed with you.

I wouldn’t be saying that it takes more than Linus to build Linux if Linus agreed with me?

What on earth are you talking about? Don’t quit your day job to become a detective.

Absolutely. If Linus had said "Rust for Linux might go away" then you would have said "See! The creator and leader of Linux says Rust is going to go away!" but because he said it is here to stay you're saying "Pff, Linus isn't that important."

I won't quit my day job to become a detective because actual detective work isn't this trivial.

Do you think everyone you speak to online is this misinformed or has these takes?

I’ve read and listened to enough of Linus to know he says this himself. The Linux kernel is nothing without the maintainers, this is easily observable and everyone knows it.

You see the reason you shouldn’t go into detective work is because you’d be terrible at it, not because it’s non-trivial.

It has been approved as the same standing as C and assembly, it is there to stay despite what the haters say [1]. Linus is behind the push and for good reasons. Android keeps demonstrating year after year the benefits, at some point I don't know what else to say.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-Kernel-Rust-Support-Offic...

Just because something is beneficial does not mean it will be taken up by the community. My question is (and that is what I'm most interested in atm) what makes Rust's adoption inevitable? Are there people paying to make that happen? Are kernel level security bugs that big of a concern now that migrating to Rust is a pressing issue? Do you see what I mean?

(Again, just to clarify my comment: I'm not challenging anyone. It's just that there are hundreds of programming languages out there. Rust's been around for a good while. So, why now? And circling back to my original question, what makes its adoption inevitable?)

I think fundamentally it's because it's a better language than C and more pleasant to write.

Sure there will be a lot of old codgers who don't want to learn new things (surprisingly common in the tech industry), but eventually they'll retire or die, and new kernel devs will be very unlikely to pick C over Rust.

The security thing is definitely a driving force but I think probably not that much just compared to how much easier and more pleasant it is to write correct Rust than correct C (in most cases).

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