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Comment by shadowgovt

10 months ago

I think it looks like both sides are making some pretty valid points here.

Those who are nervous about embracing Rust further are just fine. Rust is still a young language. It shows an awful lot of promise, but it isn't a magic cure for safety and security concerns, especially at the kernel level. It is entirely possible that Linux is a bad fit for the language, and the real way to get ta Rust kernel is for a team to come together and implement a kernel in Rust, from scratch, perhaps with POSIX compatibility.

On the flip side, Hector is entirely correct that the overall process of maintaining and improving Linux is incredibly baroque and grounded squarely in some tooling that just stinks in the modern ecosystem. It has worked for Linux for ages. It is also increasingly making working on Linux a specialized project space because nobody else manages projects like this. Hector is fine leaving if he finds that process two owners to be worth his volunteered time. And it is entirely possible that there will come a day when the value of the project itself is outweighed by the cost of interacting with the project and Linux will get supplanted in the common ecosystem by something else.

In short, Hector is probably making the right move here. If he wants to continue working on a problem like this, a new operating system might actually be the right solution.