Maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s understandable that some people are reluctant.
I understand that position. I also understand how the words and phrases that the C community has used to communicate with the Rust community seems to be completely dismissive, not just reluctant.
I quoted what I did explicitly because of how a statement like that comes off to the person it’s aimed at. It doesn’t make them feel like they’re on an even footing working on the same project with the overall goal of it becoming better.
memory safety is more akin to changing languages from English to Esperanto because it has gender neutral pronouns.
I mean… not at all? Memory safety is huge for cybersecurity, buffer overflows and the like are common attack surfaces. C requires you to have deep knowledge of safe memory management practices and even then you can end up with memory issues. Rust was developed to avoid such issues entirely. I understand the reluctance but it feels to me like arguing “we should just stick with COBOL because it works.”
Gender neutral pronouns are pretty huge too. Sure you can do them in English without too many problems usually, just as it’s also possible to code safely in C. It requires everyone to change their old habits, but it’s much less of a change than is involved in adopting a whole new language.
I would still say that getting people to the point where they can write safe C code every time is harder than learning Rust, as it’s equivalent to being able to write rust code that compiles without any safety issues (compiler errors) every single time, which is very difficult to do.
Don’t thinknits possible by on write safe c code. Otherwise we would not have these issues time and time again. But yes its only the idiots begin don’t know how to code. Projects are big and complicated itsneasy to make mistakes.
I understand the reluctance but it feels to me like arguing “we should just stick with COBOL because it works.”
For those depending on COBOL code that does the job and has been doing it just well for a few decades, there are approximately zero good reasons to not stick with it.
Eventually all the people who know and are good at cobol will die.
A while before that happens, the people who know it will continually demand more money for their rare skills.
Eventually, the cobol systems out there will need to interface new systems in some way it wasn’t designed to and it’ll be more expensive to shoehorn the remote system than to let the ancient beast retire.
Even if, we are talking about the Linux kernel. Our entire ecosystem builds upon C. People choosing C for new projects because it is the common denominator.
If Rust should be adopted in the kernel faster, patches should be send which comment how each line addresses issues of memory management solved and elaborations for rust specific patterns unfamiliar to a C dev.
Lurkers will pick up Rust that way as well.
Each Rust dev had to pick it up and therefore should be able to enable other - probably more experienced - Linux kernel hacker to provide reviewable patches.
It shouldn’t be the other way around, else you are just stepping on the efforts the other human provided to that project.
I’m not against Rust. I’d like to see something less dangerous with memory than C, but I don’t think it’s time yet for the kernel to leave C.
It’s pretty clean, stable, it’s working well at the moment and the C language (or variants of it) is/are still actively used everywhere. I think the kernel universally going Rust will be a long road of everything under the sun going there first before it’s ported in earnest.
I understand that position. I also understand how the words and phrases that the C community has used to communicate with the Rust community seems to be completely dismissive, not just reluctant.
I quoted what I did explicitly because of how a statement like that comes off to the person it’s aimed at. It doesn’t make them feel like they’re on an even footing working on the same project with the overall goal of it becoming better.
I mean… not at all? Memory safety is huge for cybersecurity, buffer overflows and the like are common attack surfaces. C requires you to have deep knowledge of safe memory management practices and even then you can end up with memory issues. Rust was developed to avoid such issues entirely. I understand the reluctance but it feels to me like arguing “we should just stick with COBOL because it works.”
Gender neutral pronouns are pretty huge too. Sure you can do them in English without too many problems usually, just as it’s also possible to code safely in C. It requires everyone to change their old habits, but it’s much less of a change than is involved in adopting a whole new language.
Anyway, I do like Rust better personally.
I would still say that getting people to the point where they can write safe C code every time is harder than learning Rust, as it’s equivalent to being able to write rust code that compiles without any safety issues (compiler errors) every single time, which is very difficult to do.
Ok, that made your analogy make more sense to me. Thanks.
Gender neutral pronouns might be pretty huge too, but nobody’s private data is getting hacked because of gendered pronoun use.
Don’t thinknits possible by on write safe c code. Otherwise we would not have these issues time and time again. But yes its only the idiots begin don’t know how to code. Projects are big and complicated itsneasy to make mistakes.
For those depending on COBOL code that does the job and has been doing it just well for a few decades, there are approximately zero good reasons to not stick with it.
Even if, we are talking about the Linux kernel. Our entire ecosystem builds upon C. People choosing C for new projects because it is the common denominator.
If Rust should be adopted in the kernel faster, patches should be send which comment how each line addresses issues of memory management solved and elaborations for rust specific patterns unfamiliar to a C dev.
Lurkers will pick up Rust that way as well.
Each Rust dev had to pick it up and therefore should be able to enable other - probably more experienced - Linux kernel hacker to provide reviewable patches.
It shouldn’t be the other way around, else you are just stepping on the efforts the other human provided to that project.
I’m not against Rust. I’d like to see something less dangerous with memory than C, but I don’t think it’s time yet for the kernel to leave C.
It’s pretty clean, stable, it’s working well at the moment and the C language (or variants of it) is/are still actively used everywhere. I think the kernel universally going Rust will be a long road of everything under the sun going there first before it’s ported in earnest.
Does it count as “doing it well” when every release has fixes for previous releases’ memory bugs?