Re: [PATCH 00/13] [RFC] Rust support

[Linus Walleij]

On Wed, May 5, 2021 at 1:30 AM Miguel Ojeda
<miguel.ojeda.sandonis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 11:21 PM Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I think right now the right thing for Rust is to work out-of-tree until
> > there is Rust support for all archs, while encouraging kernel
> > developers to learn the language.
>
> That would be an option, yes, but if the decision ends up being made
> and we are encouraging kernel developers to learn the language, what
> do we achieve by keeping things out-of-tree?
>
> In fact, by getting in-tree people, organizations & companies would be
> encouraged to give more support sooner rather than later to the LLVM
> backends they care about and/or to the GCC frontend for Rust. So, in a
> way, it can be a win for those projects too.

In a way it is a fair point because for example Unix and C evolved
together and were intermingled at the onset. And they kind of
needed each other to evolve.

Right now it seems like those organizations and companies
would be some academic institutions who like rust (because they
study languages and compilers) and Google. But that is a
pretty nice start, and one upside I would see in it is that
the academic people stop writing so many papers and get their
hands dirty and work on practical problems in the kernel. So
if that can be achieved I would be happy.

Yours,
Linus Walleij