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Comment by ceteia | Hacker News Reader

Weren't the old Linux kernel developers promised the opposite by Linus Torvalds? That they would be able to continue writing in C?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/20/2066

> The document claims no subsystem is forced to take Rust

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Dave Airlie is saying that the subsystem maintainers are themselves choosing to move to Rust.

But what about this statement that Linus wrote:

> That's been made clear pretty much from the very beginning, that nobody is forced to suddenly have to learn a new language, and that people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so.

If any C developer developed drivers in C previously for the DRM subsystem, they might in the future be forced to learn Rust.

Nothing is happening “suddenly”, and it remains true that “people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so”.

But, is this true or false?

> If any C developer developed drivers in C previously for the DRM subsystem, they might in the future be forced to learn Rust.

Whether that's true or false depends on what your hypothetical developer wants to do in the future. When an all-new driver is written in Rust, then working on that driver will require knowing Rust. But nobody's talking about trying to re-write all the existing drivers in Rust, so there will still be plenty of C code to work on even in the DRM subsystem.

> When an all-new driver is written in Rust, then working on that driver will require knowing Rust.

But that is not what the claim is about, it is about any new driver, not a specific one.

I think this is true. But that'd be nonetheless up to the subsystem maintainers.

That means that, even if a C developer used or added C bindings to DRM when wanting to write a new driver, they would be forced to write their new driver in Rust regardless. That seems to run counter to the promises made by Linus.

You're confusing the audience here. That's directed at subsystem maintainers, not just 'anyone who wants to submit a patch'. If a subsystem doesn't want to deal with Rust code, they won't be forced to. But there's no restriction on the inverse.

I don't believe that I am. Especially given the other arguments and claims in the email.

I'm not seeing any claims in the email which counter my interpretation.

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