I understand the reluctance but it feels to me like arguing “we should just stick with COBOL because it works.”
For those depending on COBOL code that does the job and has been doing it just well for a few decades, there are approximately zero good reasons to not stick with it.
Eventually all the people who know and are good at cobol will die.
A while before that happens, the people who know it will continually demand more money for their rare skills.
Eventually, the cobol systems out there will need to interface new systems in some way it wasn’t designed to and it’ll be more expensive to shoehorn the remote system than to let the ancient beast retire.
I’m not against Rust. I’d like to see something less dangerous with memory than C, but I don’t think it’s time yet for the kernel to leave C.
It’s pretty clean, stable, it’s working well at the moment and the C language (or variants of it) is/are still actively used everywhere. I think the kernel universally going Rust will be a long road of everything under the sun going there first before it’s ported in earnest.
The goal ATM is simply to allow people to write new drivers in rust, not convert the whole kernel to rust. It will be a very long time, before more core parts would be allowed to be written in rust let alone rewriting any existing core kernel code. Which is all fine as new drivers are a large part where bugs are added - older parts have had a long time for bugs to be found and fixed and so it is far less important to need to rewrite them.
For those depending on COBOL code that does the job and has been doing it just well for a few decades, there are approximately zero good reasons to not stick with it.
deleted by creator
I’m not against Rust. I’d like to see something less dangerous with memory than C, but I don’t think it’s time yet for the kernel to leave C.
It’s pretty clean, stable, it’s working well at the moment and the C language (or variants of it) is/are still actively used everywhere. I think the kernel universally going Rust will be a long road of everything under the sun going there first before it’s ported in earnest.
The goal ATM is simply to allow people to write new drivers in rust, not convert the whole kernel to rust. It will be a very long time, before more core parts would be allowed to be written in rust let alone rewriting any existing core kernel code. Which is all fine as new drivers are a large part where bugs are added - older parts have had a long time for bugs to be found and fixed and so it is far less important to need to rewrite them.
Yes there is never old code with bugs that have been sitting there for decades.
Does it count as “doing it well” when every release has fixes for previous releases’ memory bugs?