As soon as Linus retires, there will be an initiative to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust assisted by LLMs. Either that, or some company will fund a fork before that. Imagine, man pages full of emojis!

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steveklabnik 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Linus is supportive of Rust and uses LLMs.

The reasons to not have a full-Rust Linux kernel are over more important, real engineering things. (Platform support being the big one.)

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JoshTriplett an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Platform support being the big one.

And between rustc_codegen_gcc, projects like https://github.com/FractalFir/crustc, the ongoing addition of backends to LLVM and Rust, and the eventual removal of obsolete targets as hardware goes away, that's less and less of a problem.

	▲	steveklabnik an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I certainly don't think it'll be a barrier forever, for sure.

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xedrac an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Since the Rust support in the kernel is not optional, it already has an impact on platform support, no? Or maybe they are using the gnu toolchain to avoid that?

	▲	JoshTriplett an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Rust support in the kernel is still optional; it's currently only allowed in drivers, and drivers only use Rust if they can accept running only on current Rust targets (which is not a substantive limitation). I expect Rust to eventually get used in the core kernel, or in drivers that everyone wants to use (e.g. some new bus or device on most new hardware), but I expect that by the time that happens the set of targets supported by the kernel and the set of targets supported by Rust (including through things like crustc and codegen_gcc) will have converged sufficiently.

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lioeters 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]