I have no fists in this fight, but wanted some clarification.

Are you saying the reason Rust is now being integrated into the Kernel instead of Golang is because of the success of evangelists, not because of the merit of the language itself?

I'm not involved in Kernel development myself, but if I was, I'd see your statement as a big hit in the face that we don't know what we're doing, if they (Kernel developers) are being sold to use Rust because of marketing, not because of the value of the language.

I must admit, I am still surprised to see Rust gaining acceptance when the reasons Linus gave in 2010 for rejecting C++ in the kernel appear to apply to Rust equally well. I can't think of any of the pragmatic points which he raised which doesn't apply to Rust.

For example, the arguments against namespaces and function overloading, high context dependency, easy of understanding and in favour of C's simplicity in general.

My guess (it's just a guess) is that his position has shifted over time to consider a higher-abstraction, higher-complexity language, as development methods and the complexity and professionalising of the kernel have changed since then.

Its not existing kernel devs that suddenly switched to rust. It is the incoming cohort.

The main push for and patches to include rust in linux have come from an established and longtime kernel contributor. What you’re saying is categorically false.

For someone to start using a new language in the Kernel, some of the existing "guard" has to approve it, meaning they've investigated if it's fit or not. Or can anyone willy-nilly contribute to the Kernel without anyone approving changes going into the main branch?

Miguel Ojeda is doing the lion’s share of the work here, and he is a kernel maintainer: https://ojeda.dev/

The person you’re replying to is either deeply misinformed or trolling

The existing guard doesnt have to prove anything, theyre on the way out. C is a tough language and not a lot of people have the patience for it, and even less people are being forced to learn it like the rest of us in school. As this segment of the community ages out, we arent going to see more code written in C, so we have the new group with Rust, recreating all of the same issues in effigy of C, but with better string handling. It's not like it is terrible code, but as Nikola Tesla used to say "it is what it is, and it aint what it aint".

You see how parties completely unrelated to the fight got Linus ousted? That was not based on technical merit, it was due to the changing tide regarding outcomes when people are offended/mistreated. Rust has significant overlap with the community that gave way to this, don't think it is 100% open arms and welcomes, because that is not the case.

Every day we stray further from God.

Damn right I don't have the patience for C. Writing anything in C properly takes a long time, and even then bugs are usually found after.

Compare and contrast Rust, where the code I write will usually just work. I don't need to be extra careful with it because the compiler is strict. You can say that this is indicative of some flaw in my character or whatever, but, uh, I don't care.

Cool, so everyone can just ignore you then, since this is entirely incorrect.

My understanding is that Go has several features that make it unsuitable as a Linux kernel language, e.g. automatic garbage collection, its concurrency model, and possibly the nature of its runtime dependency (which is related to the previous two items.)

Garbage collection is not mandatory, and the concurrency model is often hailed as one of Gos best features.

A best feature it may well be, but it requires infrastructure and the OS kernel provides that infrastructure it doesn't depend on it.

Rust for Linux relies on the fact that Rust is deliberately structured in layers so that the bottom layer doesn't need that infrastructure, this was needed to make embedded Rust practical, but it's also important for Linux. Actually, Linux needs even more than Rust had initially, but that's driven further improvements to Rust itself.

You could add a layer to do all this lifting (that's what e.g. a Java OS does) but that's not going to fly in Linux, which is one reason why Go for Linux isn't a thing whereas Rust for Linux is.

>Garbage collection is not mandatory

What does that mean? Isn't GC a fundamental part of Go?

I'd never use Go to write a kernel in, but you can disable the GC using `GOGC=off`.

I like Go and I use it often. I also work on kernels. Go is not suitable for writing kernels.

Im choosing to imagine that you typed this with one hand behind your back with some fingers crossed Drew.