Rust-for-Linux VS just

Compare Rust-for-Linux vs just and see what are their differences.

Rust-for-Linux

Adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel. (by Rust-for-Linux)

just

🤖 Just a command runner (by casey)
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Rust-for-Linux just
79 161
3,769 16,682
1.9% -
0.0 9.1
4 days ago 3 days ago
C Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Rust-for-Linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of Rust-for-Linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-18.
  • The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    At least according to the Github's language breakdown for https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux, C is still 98.3% of the repository, and Rust is in the 0.1% of "others".
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    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

  • Mark Russinovich: “Working towards enabling Windows driver development in Rust”
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023
    > 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

  • The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023
    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?

  • The state of Flatpak security: major Projects are the worst?
    3 projects | /r/flatpak | 20 Feb 2023
    Rust-for-Linux issue tracker
  • rust devs in a nutshell
    2 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 14 Feb 2023
  • Rustproofing Linux (Part 1/4 Leaking Addresses)
    2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023
    Also, there already exists both issue: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/479
    2 projects | /r/rust | 10 Feb 2023
    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.
  • how to compile a rust "hello world" with kernel 6.1?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 23 Dec 2022
    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.
  • Rust in the 6.2 Kernel
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Nov 2022
    > Also we’re bringing NPM style supply chain problems to the kernel now?

    Nope. They've thought that through.

    (In fact, cargo is only used to build test helpers. https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/blob/rust/Documentat...)

just

Posts with mentions or reviews of just. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-21.
  • Which command did you run 1731 days ago?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jan 2024
    > When a command has some cognitive requirements I create a script with some ${1:-default} values and I store them all in $PATH enabled local/bin

    I would consider using just for this:

    https://github.com/casey/just

  • Using Make – writing less Makefile
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    Your coworker's experience is more principled: Make is a mediocre tool for executing commands. It wasn't ever designed for that. Although it is pretty common to see what you are mentioning in projects because it doesn't require installing a dependency.

    For a repo where an easy to install (single binary) dependency is a non-issue, consider using just. [1] You get `just -l` where you can see all the command available, the ability to use different languages, and overall simpler command writing.

    [1] https://github.com/casey/just

  • Show HN: Just.sh – compiler that turns Justfiles into portable shell scripts
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    This is fantastic, but I'd say that this solution is somewhat in response to this open issue from 2019:

    https://github.com/casey/just/issues/429

    I really wish just was included as a package in distributions.

  • Sharing Saturday #496
    6 projects | /r/roguelikedev | 8 Dec 2023
    So far, I didn't work on new features at all but on stabilizing the ground for further development: 1. CMake lists and modules were rewritten a lot, now managing builds and their configurations is much lesser pain. 2. Brought in Justfile for regular tasks, and it's great, no less. 3. Linters, formatters, analyzers for almost all the code (except for Janet for now, as because of it being a niche and young technology, it didn't get enough attention yet). 4. ECS stub. Now runtime class doesn't look like a god object. 5. Started writing unit tests which didn't happen with my personal projects before and maybe indicates how serious am I about this one :D 6. Some of previously hardcoded data has been moved to INI files. Now, if I release the game in 10 years, and in 10 more years some eccentric person decides to make a variant of it, it will be slightly simpler.
  • What’s with DevOps engineers using `make` of all things?
    17 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/casey/just - more of a command runner but the Justfile syntax is quite Makefile-like.
    17 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    If you dislike make checkout just https://github.com/casey/just
    17 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    i've grown to like this for my personal projects. https://github.com/casey/just
    17 projects | /r/devops | 6 Dec 2023
    Make is not exactly made for task definition and running, but it can be used like so as long as you know its quirks and counter intuitive gotchas, of which there are many seeing as Make is meant for building sources first and foremost. I use it a lot. I've been meaning to convert at least my personal stuff to https://github.com/casey/just or another task runner for some time though, Make can really be annoying sometimes.
  • Show HN: Jeeves – A Pythonic Alternative to GNU Make
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Nov 2023
    Reminds me of `just`. Which I love.

    https://github.com/casey/just

  • Dev Containers: Open, Develop, Repeat...
    9 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2023
    In my example above, I installed the developer tool "Just" as a Dev Container feature. I could also install it by adding the install script to my Dockerfile. However, I would have to build my own Dockerfile and would have to maintain this piece of code myself. This Dev Container Feature works on different architectures and base images, which makes them convenient to use.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Rust-for-Linux and just you can also consider the following projects:

Task - A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go

cargo-make - Rust task runner and build tool.

cargo-xtask

Taskfile - Repository for the Taskfile template.

CodeLLDB - A native debugger extension for VSCode based on LLDB

cargo-release - Cargo subcommand `release`: everything about releasing a rust crate.

helix - A post-modern modal text editor.

jakt - The Jakt Programming Language

Module Linker - browse modules by clicking directly on "import" statements on GitHub

Clippy - A bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code. Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/

zenith - Zenith - sort of like top or htop but with zoom-able charts, CPU, GPU, network, and disk usage

gccrs - GCC Front-End for Rust