Comment by cardanome
2 days ago
The rust drama is completely overblown considering rust is still years away from being a viable replacement. Sure it makes sense to start experimenting and maybe write a few drivers in rust but many features are still only available in nightly rust.
I suspect many rust devs tend to be on the younger side, while the old C guard sees Linux development in terms of decades. Change takes time.
Monolithic kernels are fine. The higher complexity and worse performance of a microkernel design are mostly not worth the theoretical architectural advantages.
If you wanted to get out of the current local optimum you would have to think outside of the unix design.
The main treat for Linux is the Linux Foundation that is controlled by big tech monopolists like Microsoft and only spends only a small fraction on actual Kernel development. It is embrace, extend, extinguish all over but people think Microsoft are the good guys now.
> but many features are still only available in nightly rust.
Nope. The features are all in stable releases (Since last Spring in fact). However some of the features are still marked as unstable/experimental and have to be opted-in (so could in theory have breaking changes still). They're entirely features that are specific to kernel development and are only needed in the rust bindings layer to provide safe abstractions in a kernel environment.