Linus Torvalds Speaks on the the divide between Rust and C Linux developers an the future Linux. Will things like fragmentation among the open source communi...
    • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

      Start the linuxa or alinux project and off you trot. Find a better name than I did here and you’ll be fine.

    • nyan@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      3 months ago

      Nor does Forth (which used to be a common choice for “first thing to bootstrap on this new chip architecture we have no real OS for yet”). Alas, they’re just not popular languages these days.

      • solrize@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 months ago

        Forth is fun but not really suitable for large, long-lasting projects with huge developer communities. Linux isn’t being bootstrapped, it’s already here and has been around for decades and it’s huge. And, I think bootstrapping-by-poking-around on a new architecture has stopped being important. Today, you have compiler and OS’s targeted to the new architecture under simulation long before there is any hardware, with excellent debugging tools available in the simulator.

      • solrize@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 months ago

        I have played with Ada but not done anything “real” with it. I think I’d be ok with using it. It seems better than C in most regards. I haven’t really looked into Rust but from what I can gather, its main innovation is the borrow checker, and Ada might get something like that too (influenced by Rust).

        I don’t understand why Linux is so huge and complicaed anyway. At least on servers, most Linux kernels are running under hypervisors that abstract away the hardware. So what else is going on in there? Linux is at least 10x as much code as BSD kernels from back in the day (idk about now). It might be feasible to write a usable Posix kernel as a hypervisor guest in a garbage collected language. But, I haven’t looked into this very much.

        Here’s an ok overview of Ada: http://cowlark.com/2014-04-27-ada/index.html

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
      1·
      3 months ago

      This is how they want to frame it. C has footguns, therefore use Rust—instead of Rust is one of the options you could use.

      • solrize@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 months ago

        I don’t think Ada in the kernel would get any cultural acceptance. Rust has been hard enough. C++ was vehemently rejected decades ago though the reasons made some sense at the time. Adopting C++ today would be pretty crazy. I don’t see much alternative to Rust (or in a different world, Ada) in the monolithic kernel. But Rust seems like it’s still in beta test, and the kernel architecture itself seems like a legacy beast. Do you know of anything else? I can’t take D or Eiffel or anything like that seriously. And part of it is the crappiness of the hardware companies. Maybe it will have to be left to future generations.