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What's the value and novelty of writing an OS in Rust?

steveklabnik 11y ago
> value Well, Rust is a systems language, and so it should be a good fit for OS development. We're still working on bits of it, but it's a stated goal of the language, so testing that out is valuable. > Novelty Well, Rust is still a fairly young language, so there aren't a ton of people doing things with it yet, relatively speaking. And for OS dev, which is kind of a niche subject anyway (as much as I love it), there's naturally even less. So it's basically novel by definition.
- bulutsuzku 11y ago
  > Well, Rust is a systems language, and so it should be a good fit for OS development. We're still working on bits of it, but it's a stated goal of the language, so testing that out is valuable. My questions was not well formulated. Let me rephrase it: C is also a system language and there are plenty of OS libraries written in C. C++ could be seen as another system language. Even the syntax of Rust is similar to C/C++ according to Wikipedia article. So, what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language? Better support for autonomous systems? Reflective model? Do you have a paper? It is a research project? Do you plan to replace Linux or something like that?
  - Zarathustra30 11y ago
    (Safe) Rust provides some nice guarantees. It (should be) impossible to have use-after-free, buffer overruns, race conditions, etc. in 100% Safe Rust. A pure Rust OS could provide a safe interface to build safe programs. While mostly a novelty, an OS capable of executing untrusted code risk-free could be a powerful tool indeed.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    > what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language? Memory safety without garbage collection is Rust's core feature. > Do you have a paper? It is a research project? I'm not the author.
pjmlp 11y ago
To prove to all C fanboys that believe it is the only language that ever existed for systems programming, that there are memory safe ways to do systems programming. And in the process advance the current state of OS safety.

> value Well, Rust is a systems language, and so it should be a good fit for OS development. We're still working on bits of it, but it's a stated goal of the language, so testing that out is valuable. > Novelty Well, Rust is still a fairly young language, so there aren't a ton of people doing things with it yet, relatively speaking. And for OS dev, which is kind of a niche subject anyway (as much as I love it), there's naturally even less. So it's basically novel by definition.

bulutsuzku 11y ago
> Well, Rust is a systems language, and so it should be a good fit for OS development. We're still working on bits of it, but it's a stated goal of the language, so testing that out is valuable. My questions was not well formulated. Let me rephrase it: C is also a system language and there are plenty of OS libraries written in C. C++ could be seen as another system language. Even the syntax of Rust is similar to C/C++ according to Wikipedia article. So, what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language? Better support for autonomous systems? Reflective model? Do you have a paper? It is a research project? Do you plan to replace Linux or something like that?
- Zarathustra30 11y ago
  (Safe) Rust provides some nice guarantees. It (should be) impossible to have use-after-free, buffer overruns, race conditions, etc. in 100% Safe Rust. A pure Rust OS could provide a safe interface to build safe programs. While mostly a novelty, an OS capable of executing untrusted code risk-free could be a powerful tool indeed.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  > what's the advantage of Rust over other systems language? Memory safety without garbage collection is Rust's core feature. > Do you have a paper? It is a research project? I'm not the author.

pjmlp 11y ago

To prove to all C fanboys that believe it is the only language that ever existed for systems programming, that there are memory safe ways to do systems programming. And in the process advance the current state of OS safety.