Comment by Too
1 year ago
With the vendor/system split introduced by project Treble in Android, it should be easier than ever to build your own system against a rich set of hardware abstractions, that work on a wide range of devices. Assuming you are ok with still running a very thick slice of the stack as proprietary vendor image.
Yes you can run a GSI (and project Droidian does that) but then you're dependent on a downstream kernel and Android-ish early boot environment, that will likely lead to pointless incompatibilities compared to a fully-upstreamed approach.
Upstream doesn't care about clang and Rust as much as Google does, so that isn't ever going to happen as much as people vouch for it.
The biggest hurdle to getting AOSP-kernel features into the upstream kernel is not clang or Rust, it's cleaning up hacked-together kernel code in a way that makes it long-term acceptable to upstream maintainers. (And getting rid of userspace blobs for things like graphics.) Always has been for as long as AOSP was a thing.