'Rust makes coding fun again': Why Linux is moving away from C, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman
2026-07-17 06:27 UTC
Replies (9)
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@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2026-07-17 06:30
Kroah‑Hartman consistently framed language choices in terms of reviewer workload rather than developer convenience. Linux has “over 5,000 developers” but “about 150 core maintainers that review the majority of the code,” a skew that drives his priorities. “We optimize for reviewers. We don’t optimize for developers because we have a lot of developers,” he said, suggesting Rust’s ability to enforce locking and lifetime rules at build time means reviewers can spend their limited bandwidth on logic rather than bookkeeping: “If it builds as a reviewer, I know it’s OK. I can look at the logic.” That’s a great point. Living open source code must be readable and maintainable. Rust is an excellent match for that.
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@HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2026-07-17 06:51
Don’t know about “fun again” but definitely less nervewracking and paranoia inducing.
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@hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 2026-07-17 08:13
Interesting, that’s a real change to the last discussion in the email chains where they kind pushed rust out of the core development and said they would need to fork the kernel / make their own smaller modules to bs adopted. I still remember one of the maintainers leaving over concerns about multiple languages in the kernel and Linus Torvalds having to chime in personally to set the new direction.
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@SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2026-07-17 08:58
Greg is evil, don’t mind MIT code in the kernel and it was the main proponent of AI in the maintenance process. The Linux Foundation (MS, Oracle, Anthropic, IBM, you know the drill, probably Palantir is there too, just in secrecy) guys love him.
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@pewpew@feddit.it 2026-07-17 09:04
What part of Rust is fun? C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point. C is also great for learning low level coding, I find Rust so confusing
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@yogthos@lemmy.ml 2026-07-17 15:35
I’ve got a non trivial project in Rust, and it takes like 5 min to compile on my machine. Personally, I don’t know how anybody can call this fun. I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate. And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.
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@fubarx@lemmy.world 2026-07-17 17:20
So many system bugs are because of unclear memory ownership, buffer overflows, and race conditions. C/C++ don’t help you avoid any of these footguns. Any other system that relies on GC is non-deterministic and prone to mystery hiccups, which is why OS and driver tech has been pretty much the same foundation since the 70s. Rust lets you avoid 2 of those 3 issues (thread race conditions are still a thing). And being compiled, instead of interpreted bytecode means you can get reasonable performance on smaller machines. No wonder these OS guys are so excited.
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@anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2026-07-18 02:29
Rust would be better if the rust community wasn’t so up everyone’s ass about using rust.
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@Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml 2026-07-18 09:16
No~o~o~o~~~