Once these patches land, network drivers will be able to be written in Rust.
Slowly but surely, the solid blocks are being placed. Some people are saying it’s happening too slowly, but I’ve read a lot of Kernel developers are worried it’s happening too fast.
I’m shocked given this quote by Torvalds “Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.” https://lwn.net/Articles/249460/
It’s certainly happening a lot faster than I expected. It will be interesting to see how the stability of rust drivers will be. Prior to reading the write-up of why the GPU drivers for the M1 silicon was written in Rust, I could not see how it would be beneficial to introduce a new point of failure by adding Rust support in the kernel, but now I think it’s a good idea to slowly migrate in that direction. It just means that I will have to teach myself Rust sooner or later.
