Did he actually say that he likes it? My impression was that it’s not his comfort zone, but he recognizes that for the vast majority of young programmers, C is not their comfort zone. And so, if they don’t hop on this Rust train, the Linux kernel is going to look like a COBOL project in a not too distant future. It does not happen very often that a programming language capable of implementing kernels gains wide-spread adoption.
If they can define a useful ABI that manages to include lifetimes, that might just be enough of an improvement to get people to switch over from assuming the C ABI everywhere.
The problem is that both Rust and Go are huge. The compiled binaries are bigger and the compilers themselves and slower and more resource intensive. The current benefit to C is that is lean and compiles quickly.
Rust is only huge because it doesn’t have an ABI. If you had an ABI (and didn’t have to compile every single dependency into the binary) the binary sizes would probably drop a lot to the point where they’re only slightly bigger than a C counterpart
Edit: I don’t know if Go has an ABI but they also include a runtime garbage collector in their binaries so that probably has something to do with it.
The cool kids are forcing people to read this at gunpoint nowadays
Right? It’s in the kernel and everything now. Linus likes it. Linus hates everything. HOW MUCH ARE THEY PAYING HIM?
Big Rust has gotten to Linus
Not the L man!
Did he actually say that he likes it? My impression was that it’s not his comfort zone, but he recognizes that for the vast majority of young programmers, C is not their comfort zone. And so, if they don’t hop on this Rust train, the Linux kernel is going to look like a COBOL project in a not too distant future. It does not happen very often that a programming language capable of implementing kernels gains wide-spread adoption.
I’m pretty sure Linus dissed on RUST, but then again he disses on everything and everyone.
I like Go better
However, C is still king in a lot of ways
C is definitely still king, but I wonder if crABI will eventually be able to dethrone it:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/111423
If they can define a useful ABI that manages to include lifetimes, that might just be enough of an improvement to get people to switch over from assuming the C ABI everywhere.
The problem is that both Rust and Go are huge. The compiled binaries are bigger and the compilers themselves and slower and more resource intensive. The current benefit to C is that is lean and compiles quickly.
Rust is only huge because it doesn’t have an ABI. If you had an ABI (and didn’t have to compile every single dependency into the binary) the binary sizes would probably drop a lot to the point where they’re only slightly bigger than a C counterpart
Edit: I don’t know if Go has an ABI but they also include a runtime garbage collector in their binaries so that probably has something to do with it.
I’ll never touch Rust.
I hate the syntax and cargo too much for that. If that means that I’ll never write mission critical, low level code, so be it.