Comment by dwattttt
10 hours ago
There is, I understand, an expectation that if you do make breaking changes to kernel APIs, you fix the callers of such APIs. Which has been a point of contention, that if a maintainer doesn't know Rust, how would they fix Rust users of an API?
The Rust for Linux folks have offered that they would fix up such changes, at least during the experimental period. I guess what this arrangement looks like long term will be discussed ~now.
Without a very hard commitment that is going to be a huge hurdle to continued adoption, and kernel work is really the one place where rust has an actual place. Everywhere else you are most likely better off using either Go or Java.
Aren't large parts of a web browser and a runtime for a programming language also better written in Rust than in Go or Java?
The runtime for a programming language, yes. The web browser thing is really not clear to me, but it certainly beats C++.
I'd say no, access to a larger pool of programmers is an important ingredient in the decision of what you want to write something in. Netscape pre-dated Java which is why it was written in C/C++ and that is why we have rust in the first place. But today we do have Java which has all of the rust safety guarantees and then some, is insanely performant for network code and has a massive amount of mindshare and available programmers. For Go the situation is a bit less good but if you really need that extra bit of performance (and you almost never really do) then it might be a good choice.
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