Greg Kroah-Hartman… urged fellow contributors to embrace those interested in contributing Rust code to improve the kernel.

"Adding another language really shouldn’t be a problem… embrace the people offering to join us

Thoughts on this?

  • gedhrel@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    To add something to this: linux has avoided internal SPIs for a long time. It’s often lauded as one of the reasons it hasn’t ossified.

    However, some subsystems have a huge amount of complexity and hidden constraint in how you correctly use them. Some of that may be inherent, but more of it will be accidental.

    Wrapping type-erased shims around this that attempt to capture (some of) those semantics shines a light onto the problem. The effort raises good technical questions around whether the C layer can be improved. Where maintainers have approached that with an open mind, the results are positive for both C and Rust consumers. Difficult interfaces are a source of bugs; it’s always worth asking whether that difficulty is inherent or accidental.