His job is to not get the maintainers to agree, but his job definitely is to bark a bit if somebody behaves like Ted.
It might even be Rust is not meant for Linux kernel and it will never happen. Or it happens in the driver layers, but stays out from the core. We do not know yet. The concern Ted is raising is definitely valid: if the C APIs change, people who work daily in the C code cannot spent cycles fixing the Rust APIs. These people have their day jobs which pays them to maintain these subsystems, and it is at least not yet clear will these employers fund rewriting anything in Rust. There are tens of filesystems in Linux, with lifetimes passing around that are not documented and might not work in Rust.
Note: I’m a Rust dev for the past 10 years, and I follow this discussion with high interest.
His job is to not get the maintainers to agree, but his job definitely is to bark a bit if somebody behaves like Ted.
It might even be Rust is not meant for Linux kernel and it will never happen. Or it happens in the driver layers, but stays out from the core. We do not know yet. The concern Ted is raising is definitely valid: if the C APIs change, people who work daily in the C code cannot spent cycles fixing the Rust APIs. These people have their day jobs which pays them to maintain these subsystems, and it is at least not yet clear will these employers fund rewriting anything in Rust. There are tens of filesystems in Linux, with lifetimes passing around that are not documented and might not work in Rust.
Note: I’m a Rust dev for the past 10 years, and I follow this discussion with high interest.