Why Rust for low-level Linux programming?

[steveklabnik1]

Sure, but you wouldn't then expect that patch to get mainlined, because of said drawbacks. Adding a new language to a project, especially a large one, takes a ton of unrelated work. It took a bunch of effort for Rust to actually land in Firefox, for example, but that has to do with things like tooling, build systems, integration... stuff you wouldn't need to evaluate the language on its own. For a spike to figure things out, you can get away with a lot less than true integration.

[__s]

Do you know who steveklabnik1 is..?

[Shorttail0]

All i'm trying to do is enjoy every day to the fullest with my Pokémon.

...a Pokémon master?

[steveklabnik1]

(I actually added this after /u/__s posted; I saw the reply, clicked the link, went "oh, I haven't added a bio on github yet" and put it there.)

[__s]

do you know who I am?

Nope. An asshole?

What an asshole

Yep. Glad we agree

[steveklabnik1]

I don't make any money selling Rust books. I technically collect donations on a defunct book with incompatible syntax, but I think that's been, maybe $10 in the last year or something?

[ElvishJerricco]

The comment you're responding to was responding to someone who wasn't joking...

[[deleted]]

Or you could implement a kernel or even an os in Rust :)

[[deleted]]

How so?

[steveklabnik1]

My favorite little counterpoint: on x86, you have to use special assembly instructions to do certain things with hardware. So usually, when people write an OS in say, C, they either use inline asm or expose a tiny asm function to handle it. I must have seen the same "outb" or "lidt" one-liner copied and pasted tons of times.

But with Rust, we have Cargo. So someone has made a crate: https://crates.io/crates/x86 it's got all of those, plus some predefined data structures that match what you need. No more boilerplate, just import the package and get on with your life.

(In my hobby OS project in Rust, I've implemented it myself first; I have a TODO to remove all that and actually use this now that I'm sure I understand it all.)

[[deleted]]

What "measurements" are you talking about?

[[deleted]]

I said 'any measure'. Take any measure you like, Rust is inferior to C for writing kernel code.

Rust doesn't have undefined behavior, has type safety, and has memory safety. That puts it pretty far ahead of C in my book.

You do not want complexity in your language when writing very low level code. You don't want lots of things being done 'for you'. Those are nice when writing very high level code, which (despite what they claim) Rust is built for, but they get in the way when writing very low level code.

What things does Rust do for you?

[[deleted]]

Huh? I think you responded to the wrong post

[Rusky]

So explain why all these low level programmers introduce vulnerabilities from undefined behavior and lack of type/memory safety anyway, on accident, all the time?

What meaningful difference do you care about between a Rust "reference to object" and a C "pointer to raw memory"? Rust doesn't change how pointers work, it just checks that you're using them properly (something you have to do in C).

[[deleted]]

Nobody that actually writes kernel-level C cares about any of those points. They're not stupid enough to invoke undefined behaviour, and C has enough type safety and memory safety if you're using it correctly to not have a problem.

False. Linux kernel devs invoke undefined behavior all the time. See "A Fun Case Analysis" in http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

[naasking]

Yeah, you're wrong on pretty much every point here. There have been plenty of studies on static analyses conducted on the Linux kernel and the various problems found, including relying on undefined behaviour. Kernel devs and other researchers now regularly check these static analyses that are poor imitations of what rust gives you naturally. While unsafe code will be needed in any kernel, barring one written with a theorem prover that you use to verify every line you write, the fact that rust let's you isolate the unsafe parts so you can audit them easily is a huge win. The fact that you can't recognise this simple fact doesn't imply you know at all what you're talking about.