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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

If the readme is anything to go by, this doesn't look like it was written by hand. Codex if I were to guess. I wonder the coding agent "improved" the code.

The readme hints at the prompt:

> It keeps the original system's semantics — what it does — while rethinking how it's expressed: stronger types, clearer module boundaries, idiomatic abstractions everywhere.

"idiomatic abstractions" would certainly bloat the line count.

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If that's the case, I don't really get the purpose of this. It's presumably not a useful system for day to day computing. The main reason I could see someone wanting to build this would be as an educational exercise, and using an LLM to do it completely fails at that.

Figuring out how to prompt and test is educational, and it's potentially a useful test of a model/harness.

The purpose of this project is probably to create something that can be pointed to while saying "This is evidence that the entire Linux kernel could be rewritten in Rust! So now you have to agree to rewrite the modern kernel!"

The linux kernel is already bloated. We don't need more bloat.

I would presume Linux 0.11 itself wouldn’t be considered very useful for day to day computing this century. This seems a proof of concept on a very early, simpler version of the kernel. As a PoC I find it useful as exactly that.

Well maybe they just did it for fun

kinda sad cuz 10klines you really get into "well I can just sit there and bang at the problem by hand" territory.

Sounds like a fun project....

Linux at that point’s whole purpose was to bang at it by hand and learn something. There’s a ton of irony in having an LLM do it.

RedHat used to have a poster of the linux source code. Because some early version did fit a large sheet of paper.

Not sure if that's still available but it was a fun poster that I can highly recommend.

That's odd. Abstractions in other programming languages reduce the line count.

so, slop

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