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'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel, despite the doubters
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Progress?
Just curious - when's the last time you compiled the kernel yourself? Do you remember how long it took? And that was all just C, which - while not exactly fast - is at least an order of magnitude faster to compile than Rust.
I'm seriously concerned that if Linux rally slowly does become predominantly Rust, development will stop, because nobody without access to a server farm will be able compile it in any reasonable amount of time.
Rust would be better suited to a micro kernel, where the core is small and subsystems can be isolated and replaced at run time.
Edit: adding a more modern language isn't a bad idea, IMHO, I just think it should be something like Zig, which has reasonable compile times and no runtime. Zig's too young, but by the time it's considered mature, Rust will either be entrenched, or such a disaster that it'll be decades before kernel developers consider letting a new language in.
Have you compared the compile times for equivalent kinds of drivers in the Linux kernel?
No, but just for you I spent time today extracting a list of ~250 packages installed from source on my computer, and tomorrow, I'm going to clean re-install all of them, timed, and post the results.
There's a mix of languages in there, and many packages have multiple language dependencies, but I'm going by the "Make Deps" package requirements and will post them.
There will probably be too many variables for a clean comparison, but I know I have things like multiple CSV and json CLI toolkits in different languages installed, so some extrapolations should be possible.
C is hard, because a lot of packages that must depend on gcc don't include it in the make dependencies; they must assume everyone has at least one C compiler installed. A couple of packages explicitly depend on clang, so I'll have that at least.
Make a YouTube on it and I'll watch it. I'm not a coder though. But benchmarking and debunking is interesting. Either way it goes. Clear or complex the results come out it'll be interesting.