Because someday the programming state of the art must advance beyond 1970, and someday we must stop introducing new memory safety bugs that cause horrific vulnerabilities, and for kernel code we don't have the luxury of recompiling everything with garbage collection turned on as a band-aid for C's incurable defects.
They wrote their own language (C) too. They invented a new language because the current crop of languages didn't suit their needs. Your argument ignores the parts of history that are inconvenient and highlights the ones that you think support it.
In-general it seems that Rust proponents want ease and modernity to replace the ability to do the same in C better, with more control and intent, and with better results.
Rust is less tight. That’s fine for an application, but the kernel is used by everyone who uses Linux.
Rustians disparage C because it doesn’t have Rust behavior.
Because someday the programming state of the art must advance beyond 1970, and someday we must stop introducing new memory safety bugs that cause horrific vulnerabilities, and for kernel code we don't have the luxury of recompiling everything with garbage collection turned on as a band-aid for C's incurable defects.
The Unix/C people wrote their own kernel in the 1970s instead of invading an existing one.
If rust didn’t provide value to the Linux kernel, there’s no way it would have made out of the experimental phase.
Rust isn’t an invading tribe. It’s just a tool.
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They wrote their own language (C) too. They invented a new language because the current crop of languages didn't suit their needs. Your argument ignores the parts of history that are inconvenient and highlights the ones that you think support it.
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"invading"
I'm sure your choice of words helps the discussion.
Back when the primary consumers of the kernel were other researchers. Not billions of machines running our society.
the kernel is the value part, not the language that the kernel is written in
I believe Linus responded to this very question. I recommend that you read through his email.
Basically, technology evolves, and you or anyone else can't stop that just because you don't like it for whatever nonsense (non technical) reason.
He also said in that same email regarding Rust that:
> nobody is forced to suddenly have to learn a new language, and that people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so.
So any argument that Rust would ever fully replace C in such a way that C would go away and be banned in the kernel is NOT what Linus said.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/20/2066
That’s a reasonable position today, but what about in 20 years?
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Going off on the name makes your entire question and argument subjective and useless in a constructive discussion.
In-general it seems that Rust proponents want ease and modernity to replace the ability to do the same in C better, with more control and intent, and with better results.
Rust is less tight. That’s fine for an application, but the kernel is used by everyone who uses Linux.
Rustians disparage C because it doesn’t have Rust behavior.
Why must the kernel have Rust behavior?
> Rustians disparage C
No, the 50+ years of ridiculously unavoidable memory corruption errors have done more to disparage C than anyone working in another language.
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