Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust

Re:Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust by pjmlp on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @08:07AM (#28999350)

It was obvious from the yearly days that C was a sharp knife, that is why lint was created in 1979.

How many people bother to actually use such tooling on their C projects?

Not many, most surveys place that number around 11%.

Just as an exercise, Github offers such tooling for C and C++ projects, try to find how many have CodeQL workflows enabled for pull requests.

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Re:Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust by bregma on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @08:16AM (#28999429)

I work with safety-certified systems written in C. The tooling around such things is extensive and mature: static analysis, extensive test runs with runtime analysis instrumentation (test coverage at the MC/DC level, valgrind for memory and concurrency analysis) it's all there and used.

It's true that a lot of projects written in C do the equivalent of using Rust's "unsafe". Then again, a lot of Rust projects use Rust's "unsafe".

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Re:Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust by pjmlp on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @08:47AM (#28999707)

Welcome to the 11% mentioned on my comment.

JOVIAL and ESPOOL were the first system languages with a notion of unsafe code blocks, both about 10 years older than C.

It is a big difference to have unsafe code jump to our eye and being easily searchable, or having each line of code as a possible source of integer overflows, memory corruption, or UB optimization exploit of the day.

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