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Comment by IshKebab

1 day ago

> So when you change the C interfaces, the Rust people will have to deal with the fallout, and will have to fix the Rust bindings.

I wasn't mistaken; this is exactly what I thought. The problem is that Rust developers aren't magical genies who you can summon to fix Rust code. In the real world they are volunteers who might be busy, on holiday, no longer interested, dead, etc. What do C maintainers do when the Rust genies don't magically appear and fix their code? Just break the Rust code? That's obviously not a good long term solution.

So while I totally disagree with the C developers - they should just learn Rust! - I don't think you can get around this point by just hand-waving "don't worry about it; someone else will fix the Rust code". Maybe in the very short term, but not in the medium term.

> The problem is that Rust developers aren't magical genies who you can summon to fix Rust code

Linus will release a broken Rust kernel. Literally that has happened before in an indirect way because it was the holidays and a patch was not merged, but was explicitly told that the only reason why it wasn't merged was because the holidays made tracking the issue harder.

Also, every new piece of code has to enter linux-next.

There are at least six people whose full time employment is working on Rust for Linux, across a few companies. That scenario won’t happen.