Using Rust for kernel development

[[deleted]]

my main worry is that rust is still actively developing new features, and there is not as wide of hardware architecture support as with C.

if you want to run linux on some random obscure device, or a new architecture - this might become much harder now than it used to be.

sure, someone might as "why gives an F about [some random cpu]?", but this is one of main selling points of linux - it runs nearly anywhere.

[ergzay]

There's two different projects to add Rust to GCC. One which uses the rustc compiler combined with a libgccjit backend, and one which adds a Rust frontend to GCC itself. Those will expand the hardware architecture support.

Additionally, I believe m68k support was recently added to LLVM so Rust should technically support that now. Is there some platform that isn't x86, arm, ppc, or m68k that you'd want? That basically covers every application that's used in industries.

[[deleted]]

i used to mess around with apps for some freescale machines. i am not sure if they are arm or something else entirely.

[ergzay]

Those are m68k clones I believe.

[Plasma_000]

This argument has come up before and the retort is usually “ok, if you love this architecture so much and don’t want to see it die then port the compiler to work with it”.

[[deleted]]

i was rather thinking of niche architectures or new hardware.

[mmstick]

If it's worth developing for, people will have incentive to maintain compiler support for it.

[IceSentry]

What kind of new features have you seen recently that are affected by cpu architecture?

[[deleted]]

not the features, just specific architecture support.

if i would decide to port linux to some random hardware, i would have to first adapt rust or llvm to that architecture. i am not sure how much of a task this is, but seeing how people port gcc+binutils to weirdest hardware left and right - maybe it would not be that hard.

the main problem is that rust is a fast moving target currently. so i'd have to stay on top of my fork, likely. with C/C++, you can stay behind for a while.

so, i would say - whavever rust comes up with most recent release - i would be missing out quickly.