Rust-for-Linux VS jakt

Rust is backwards compatible when you stick to stable features, but the kernel uses unstable features that can and do incur breaking changes.

https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2

> How would this work?

Don't know exactly what you're asking.

> And why would it be a better idea?

Poorly written device drivers are a significant attack vector. It's one of the reasons Linux is now exploring using Rust for its own device drivers.[0] You may be asking -- why Rust and not some other language? Rust has many of the performance and interoperability advantages of C and C++, but as noted, makes certain classes of memory safety issues impossible. Rust also has significant mindshare among systems programming communities.

[0]: https://rust-for-linux.com

Ctrl-F "rust"

https://rust-for-linux.com/ links to LWN articles at https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Development_tools-Rust that suggest that only basic modules are yet possible with the rust support in Linux kernels 6.2 and 6.3.

Rust-for-linux links to the Android binder module though:

> Android Binder Driver: This project is an effort to rewrite Android's Binder kernel driver in Rust.

> Motivation: Binder is one of the most security and performance critical components of Android. Android isolates apps from each other and the system by assigning each app a unique user ID (UID). This is called "application sandboxing", and is a fundamental tenet of the Android Platform Security Model.

> The majority of inter-process communication (IPC) on Android goes through Binder. Thus, memory unsafety vulnerabilities are especially critical when they happen in the Binder driver

... "Rust in the Linux kernel" (2021) https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-linux-kernel... :

> [...] We also need designs that allow code in the two languages to interact with each other: we're particularly interested in safe, zero-cost abstractions that allow Rust code to use kernel functionality written in C, and how to implement functionality in idiomatic Rust that can be called seamlessly from the C portions of the kernel.

> Since Rust is a new language for the kernel, we also have the opportunity to enforce best practices in terms of documentation and uniformity. For example, we have specific machine-checked requirements around the usage of unsafe code: for every unsafe function, the developer must document the requirements that need to be satisfied by callers to ensure that its usage is safe; additionally, for every call to unsafe functions (or usage of unsafe constructs like dereferencing a raw pointer), the developer must document the justification for why it is safe to do so.

> We'll now show how such a driver would be implemented in Rust, contrasting it with a C implementation. [...]

This guide with unsafe rust that calls into the C, and then with next gen much safer rust right next to it would be a helpful resource too.

What of the post-docker container support (with userspaces also written in go) should be cloned to rust first?

Rust-for-Linux issue tracker

Yes, I definitely agree that it's a problem that pr_info implicitly wraps its arguments in unsafe {}. I wrote my own Pull Request with a trival fix.

Note that this template won't work with Linux 6.1, which has very minimal Rust support. You'll want the RustForLinux tree, or maybe Linux 6.2.

You can join Rust for Linux zulip chat by requesting invite using the link in https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux 's README.

SerenityOS is doing exactly that:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird

I also like their Jakt programming language:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

Though I'm more enthusiastic about Redox (doing it in Rust):

https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox/

It's very opinionated and SerenityOS-focused, but the language Jakt ( https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt ) transpiles to C++, has memory safety and some very neat ideas for readability.

I love Rust, but its model and specifics would make it difficult to learn how to write code in other languages.

For low-level code, I think Carbon may fill that niche in the future. If it doesn't, C++ may be a good candidate once up-to-date books have been written and compilers actually support the modern spec. Classrooms/guides would need to move away from the still-lingering "C++ is C with classes" approach and use the standard library before that can be a reality, but this book[0] by Bjarne Stroustrup himself demonstrates the future C++ _could_ have if all the modern language features become usable.

In business, C++ will still be the domain of ancient clusterfucks compiled by MSVC++ 6 in many areas, similar to how most Java code is still built around Java 8 because that was the most recent stable version for many projects' lifecycle (and Oracle's decision to only ship JRE 8 to consumers doesn't help) and how .NET 4 is still taught in schools because the new and scary dotnet tool doesn't map 1-to-1 with the old way of working. I can't imagine microcontroller toolkits supporting a modern version of _any_ language in the first place.

However, if more people would learn modern C++ (or a replacement, like Carbon), I think this class of programming languages can have the same growth and hype Rust has enjoyed for the past years.

I'm keeping my eye on Carbon and Zig. Google's influence has managed to push Go to the forefront despite its many quirks, and Zig seems to be focused on doing "C, but right" rather than "C++, but right" which so far is looking pretty promising.

It's also fun to see Jakt[1] being developed in real time; I don't think it's a language that will be useful for production software any time soon, but on the other hand it's a language that actually produces binaries reliably (unlike pre-alpha Carbon or pre-release Zig, the latter exposing many problems after switching to a self-hosted compiler).

[0]: https://www.stroustrup.com/tour3.html

[1]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

About php, I have no problem of rewriting whole game for performance reasons once it is done and popular in low level language like https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt but I think for now php is good and sufficient.

Jakt, pretty well designed (lots of ideas stolen from ML/Rust), but very immature

I think this thread might be interesting to the people here. The guy eventually started working on his own safe language, Jakt: https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt