Committing to Rust in the Kernel

1. Rust-for-Linux

   1 84 4,147 0.0 C

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

   

   You can find the home of the project here: https://rust-for-linux.com/

   Linus has been talking publicly over the last few years about how it’s getting harder and harder to find maintainers. There are various reasons for this, but C is part of the problem. If there are newer technologies that would be appropriate for the kernel, they should be investigated.

   At the same time, more and more downstream users of the kernel have been adopting Rust, and more kernel devs have been checking out Rust and have liked what they’ve seen. Many also don’t, to be clear, but the point is that a group of people were willing to put in the work to give Rust a real shot, and so did some initial work to sketch it out.

   Linus agreed to give it a try, but there are some caveats: Rust code cannot hold up improvements to the C code. Changes to the C are allowed to break the Rust, in other words. Then, it was discussed that the right first place to try Rust would be in driver code. This has the advantage of being a real project, but also sidesteps another issue: today, Rust doesn’t support every platform Linux does. Drivers are platform specific, so you just simply only write drivers for platforms Rust supports.

   So far, there have been some successes: some example drivers have been written. There’s also been some struggles: there are some experimental features of Rust and its standard library that the code relies on. But the Rust project has committed to trying to get those finished sometime soon, so that’s not a permanent issue. There have also been some… skepticism of both Rust and the experiment by some members of the kernel development community, and that’s caused some problems. Hopefully those can be worked out too.

2. InfluxDB

   influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB high-performance time series database. Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.

   

3. hn-search

   2 2,025 555 2.9 TypeScript

   Hacker News Search

   

   I apologize, I am on my phone, so rather than curating links, check out https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu..., most of which are about this situation.

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