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A comment on Red Hat to Author New Linux Driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust. Parent comment

Re:Red Hat to Author New Linux Driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust by xorcist on Thursday March 21, 2024 @05:27AM (#39776408)
That argument is questionable. C is trivial. The PC architecture is not, and the Linux architecture absolutely not. What makes kernel programming hard is that there is a lot of knowledge that must be internalized, exactly how the DMA works for certain hardware, or why this specific bit need to be set in that lock. There's often no simple way of debugging or single stepping these things without simulating hardware.

The kernel could have been written in assembly with macros, it wouldn't make its development any harder. The best Rust can do is not make kernel more difficult than it already is.

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Re:Red Hat to Author New Linux Driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust by viraptor on Thursday March 21, 2024 @06:23AM (#39776792)
You're missing on a lot of things Rust (or any language with non-toy types) can provide. Lock ordering, better accessible complex structures, enforcement of enumerated options, rich description of APIs, and many others. Atomic values are usable transparently https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/97c628055904a7f2ef1... and multithreaded reference counting is easily enforced https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/bd0a1a7d465fcb60685... also issues like type confusion https://www.vicarius.io/vsociety/posts/a-type-confusion-bug-... are less likely if you can easily use tagged unions checked by the compiler.

The best Rust can do is enforce a number of invariants which people extremely experienced in writing "trivial C" still miss every day.

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Re:Red Hat to Author New Linux Driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust by Barrin92 on Thursday March 21, 2024 @08:00AM (#39777450)
Linus himself made that point a few months ago (https://youtu.be/YyRVOGxRKLg). If you take a look at how devoid large, important, old OSS projects are of young talent in their 20s, 30s and sometimes even 40s it's looking incredibly bleak.

Rust is technically an improvement over memory unsafe language but it also has created enthusiam among largely young and proficient coders. The ecosystem has a lot of dynamism. Drawing those people in is one of the, if not the single most important thing for the health of projects going forward with how many leaders are close to retirement.

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