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Rust is both a nice programming language, and an obnoxious social movement made of a small minority of Rust programmers who are very loud
oh I don't consider them obnoxious. I'm from Python-land, they've been saving our asses with good tooling lol. the quality of output from the rust ecosystem speaks for itself
uv <3
who are very loud
Most of the "should we or should we not" discourses/dramas I've read about were initiated or escalated by the anti-Rust crowd. They seem to be a lot more vocal (not to mention impolite) about their opinions than actual Rust developers.
Specifically in the Linux kernel, the 2 big reasons to use it are memory safety (huuuuggee benefit) and that a lot of younger devs like it and thus it will attract their contributions.
The only reasons I can think of to not use it are that some people want their own toolchain and having multiple languages in the kernel adds complication. But tbh, none of that justifies banning Rust stuff that realistically wouldn't have been written at all if C were the only option.
And then there's the people who show up in Phoronix, HN, Reddit, and YouTube comments saying Rust is over-hyped without showing why it's unfit for purpose and also trying to dictate what someone does with their own project. Perhaps it's something to do with the representation of queer people and other minorities in the Rust community, because otherwise I do not understand why people would be sooo passionate in hating the Rust community like the group I described above is.
a lot of younger devs like it and thus it will attract their contributions.
You get it! That is probably the biggest "soft" factor for why I want to see Rust proliferate. Nobody wants to learn C! It's an ancient, cumbersome language that is difficult to use in a secure way. I've been both a student and an employee at a university with many programming-related classes, and beyond the absolute basics of memory management, nobody does anything in C, or even C++. It's almost always C#, Java, Javascript, or Python. No Rust yet because most of our teachers are also geriatrics.
Linux (and FOSS in general) has an age issue. Prolific older developers are leaving their projects or transitioning to less code-focused tasks, and the ranks are not being filled. Prospective young developers simply bounce off projects because of steep entry requirements, and the active resistance of anti-Rust evangelists (the likes of Christoph Hellwig for example) doesn't help either.
having multiple languages in the kernel adds complication.
which is why we should simply rewrite the whole kernel in rust. boom problem fixed 😎 /j
That's rather rude and untrue ..... the programming language isn't at all nice! /s
ducks and runs away
small minority of Rust programmers who are very loud
They also list "written in Rust" as the primary feature of software they write, even though the majority of users don't care as long as it works properly.
It matters to potential contributors. It's also a floating signifier for a lot of things.
The majority of users aren't contributors though. It's fine to mention it in contributor documentation but I find it weird to advertise it as an end-user feature given most apps written in other languages don't do this.
It's also a floating signifier for a lot of things.
Like what?
A program being written in rust itself doesn't guarantee anything, but it tells you what you'll probably find:
- Utf-8 support
- No shenanigans with installations, dynamic libraries and such. Just download and execute.
- Multi-platform support
- Low resource usage.
- semver.
- Compile with just 1 command if you want to.
- MIT/apache2 license.
- No memory leaks.
- If it crashes, at least it will probably log out something more helpful than "SEGFAULT".
Many of those are highly positive to the end consumer.
Most of those points are true for programs written in Go too, and C# (if you use Native AoT).