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The FUD around Rusting the kernel reminds me of similar sentiments surrounding autonomous vehicles. Better != perfect; it's an evolutionary step. Even if there

The FUD around Rusting the kernel reminds me of similar sentiments surrounding autonomous vehicles. Better != perfect; it's an evolutionary step. Even if there are unintended negative consequences of Rust code, if they are less frequent than the rate we deal with bugs today, then it's worth using.

simion314 5y ago
We need to keep in mind that are 2 types of autonomus vehicles discussion. We have a company that uses a ton of hardware, radar, lidar and many cameras and then we have the other ones that want to move fast and break things using only cameras, a GPU and many beta testers. It is normal that the aproach of brute forcing it with ton of data gets a ton of criticism. My other criticism is the bad statistics used. It is like I create the "robot athlete" and I compare it stats with the average of all athletes including the young children and the people with some physical problem. You should compare self driving with cars with exact same safety features and save driver demographics. Bonus if you calculate all deaths caused by illegal driving and then ask the giants WTF not put the money into first solve the speeding and drunk / tired driving , I bet ANN work better on this problem. Rust in Linux seems to me a waste. IMO the Unix philosophy is great but it needs a better implementation , one that is based on the present day hardware and expectations.
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  > Bonus if you calculate all deaths caused by illegal driving and then ask the giants WTF not put the money into first solve the speeding and drunk / tired driving , I bet ANN work better on this problem. Why would they want to do that though? No one would buy a car with those features. I guess you could get a few people to buy one if the insurance was way lower, but you certainly wouldn't get decent market penetration.
  - simion314 5y ago
    So say someone builds a system that you install in cars that monitors how you drive, it can detect if you respect the speeding laws, if you drive normal or you have risky behavior. Few will want this in their car but they will want it on the others car so I can see this possibilities: - a law that requires it in all cars - a law that requires it in new cars - a law that requires it only for new drivers (less then 2 year) and for people caught speeding/drunk. - a law that will make certain roads only available for self driving cars or for people with this safety system. It would be a compromise between AI drivers camp and people that still want to drive themselves. Maybe you will say something about privacy, this system can be implemented with no connectivity to spy on you. It could be read only when you want to pay your insurance or in case of an accident. But also AI can be implemented in a different way, like you could have some quality cameras recording traffic and have the AI detect who is using the phone, who is not paying attention , who is moving in a erratic pattern , so it would be an advanced spending camera. The argument is that the AI driver camp will demand humans to be removed from the road, because their AI driver is better then the average. To prevent you losing the right to drive then this average needs to be improved and this can be done by removing the bad drivers and a good place to start is the ones that do not respect the rules. Otherwise you might object to install a safety system in your car but then the big companies will lobby hard and you will have to use the Tesla/Google or Apple AI powered cars, then not only that he government will know all about your movement but the ad companies will know it too.
diragon 5y ago
Rust in Linux has a known constantly showing negative consequence: it introduces another language to the stack. Furthermore, Rust is quite different from C. This makes the whole massively more complicated, and increases the amount of knowledge needed to understand the whole. The same effect applies every time a new language is introduced, if it doesn't completely replace the previously used language. In this case, Rust won't. Zig might be a better fit, given how much more similar to C it is.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Rust in Linux has a known constantly showing negative consequence It'd make your argument a lot stronger if you can actually list some of these negative consequences. "Another languages to the stack" and "Different than C" is just complaining about change because it is change. What negatives have already been shown that isn't just about "This isn't C"?
  - rollcat 5y ago
    Mixing any two languages in any single code base creates significant friction at the boundaries, and adds new degrees of complexity in major areas (build system, tooling, debugging...). If we're talking about a project as complex as a production OS kernel, this kind of a decision should never be taken lightly. It's a much smaller step from 2 to 10 than from 1 to 2.
    - cesarb 5y ago
      > It's a much smaller step from 2 to 10 than from 1 to 2. But here, you're already starting with 2: C and assembly. Besides inline assembly, a small but very important part of the Linux kernel is written in assembly on every architecture: the system call entry point (entry.S) and the kernel entry point (head.S). And if you consider each architecture's assembly as a separate language, it's more like 10 languages than 2 languages. I'm always impressed whenever I see changes to for instance signal handling or thread flags which touch not only the common code in C, but also the entry point assembly code for each one of the many architectures Linux supports; whoever does these changes need to not only know the assembly language for all these architectures, but also have at hand all the corresponding tooling and emulators to compile and test the changes.
jmull 5y ago
It seems pretty clear that rust in linux would reduce certain kinds of run-time bugs. What isn't so clear is whether, overall, rust improves linux or not. There's bad to be weighed against the good. Adding complexity strains and breaks processes, slowing development. Among other things, this means additional bugs and lets them survive longer, so it's not even clear rust is a win purely from a bug perspective.
paulddraper 5y ago
> The FUD around Rusting the kernel reminds me of similar sentiments surrounding autonomous vehicles That, but in the opposite direction. Decades of promises of self-driving cars. And still nothing able to drive without a driver. There have been small improvements...cars that have autonomous abilities in some cases. But overhauling the entire driving fleet of the world to use 5-year-old technology....it's not a realistic expectation. There are smaller, more practical expectations.
- ben-schaaf 5y ago
  > Decades of promises of self-driving cars. And still nothing able to drive without a driver. Waymo have driven 20 million miles autonomously since 2009, and as of late 2020 claim 74,000 of those were done completely driverless. They're still a far cry from being common, but they're here and they're impressively safe.
  - shakow 5y ago
    But what is the “miles on straight-ahead, well-lit US highway” vs. “kms on random European regional road” ratio?
  - paulddraper 5y ago
    > They're still a far cry from being common Sounds familiar
sidlls 5y ago
Then maybe the Rust community would be better served by not hyper-evangelizing it so much and at the same time bashing other languages? There's a perception issue here: people think that Rust people (not necessarily the maintainers or official evangelists, but the community at-large) think Rust is as close to perfect as you can get because of its safety features, because these people talk about Rust like it's a universal problem solver.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I kind of agree, that is why you tend to see for-and-against comments from my side. Despite the plus sides, there are lots of incumbents, certain domains are better served by managed languages, and regardless of our wishes C and C++ have 50 years of history. Even if we stop writing new code in those languages today, Cobol shows us how long we would still need to keep them running anyway. Microsoft, for example, despite their newly found love with Rust, is full of job ads for C++ developers in green field applications.
- moltonel3x 5y ago
  This points to the larger perception issue that "anybody who advocates for Rust is part of the Rust community and/or knows Rust well". But there are many Rust evangelists who obviously don't know much about Rust (this is not Rust-specific, it's a common issue in tech). This kind of "positive FUD" is ultimately harmful, as outsiders understandably get tired of the hype and start ignoring any pro-Rust argument, good or bad. In my experience, the community of actual Rust users is much more level-headed. While most do love the language and the "this aspect of Rust is irrefutably better than the equivalent in $OTHERLANG" opinion occasionally pops up, the community seems pragmatic and well aware of Rust's cons. Case in point: the "should I use Rust" questions on the rust subreddit don't get dogmatic answers, and often result in "Rust isn't ideal for your use-case" advice.

simion314 5y ago

We need to keep in mind that are 2 types of autonomus vehicles discussion. We have a company that uses a ton of hardware, radar, lidar and many cameras and then we have the other ones that want to move fast and break things using only cameras, a GPU and many beta testers. It is normal that the aproach of brute forcing it with ton of data gets a ton of criticism. My other criticism is the bad statistics used. It is like I create the "robot athlete" and I compare it stats with the average of all athletes including the young children and the people with some physical problem. You should compare self driving with cars with exact same safety features and save driver demographics. Bonus if you calculate all deaths caused by illegal driving and then ask the giants WTF not put the money into first solve the speeding and drunk / tired driving , I bet ANN work better on this problem. Rust in Linux seems to me a waste. IMO the Unix philosophy is great but it needs a better implementation , one that is based on the present day hardware and expectations.

sebzim4500 5y ago
> Bonus if you calculate all deaths caused by illegal driving and then ask the giants WTF not put the money into first solve the speeding and drunk / tired driving , I bet ANN work better on this problem. Why would they want to do that though? No one would buy a car with those features. I guess you could get a few people to buy one if the insurance was way lower, but you certainly wouldn't get decent market penetration.
- simion314 5y ago
  So say someone builds a system that you install in cars that monitors how you drive, it can detect if you respect the speeding laws, if you drive normal or you have risky behavior. Few will want this in their car but they will want it on the others car so I can see this possibilities: - a law that requires it in all cars - a law that requires it in new cars - a law that requires it only for new drivers (less then 2 year) and for people caught speeding/drunk. - a law that will make certain roads only available for self driving cars or for people with this safety system. It would be a compromise between AI drivers camp and people that still want to drive themselves. Maybe you will say something about privacy, this system can be implemented with no connectivity to spy on you. It could be read only when you want to pay your insurance or in case of an accident. But also AI can be implemented in a different way, like you could have some quality cameras recording traffic and have the AI detect who is using the phone, who is not paying attention , who is moving in a erratic pattern , so it would be an advanced spending camera. The argument is that the AI driver camp will demand humans to be removed from the road, because their AI driver is better then the average. To prevent you losing the right to drive then this average needs to be improved and this can be done by removing the bad drivers and a good place to start is the ones that do not respect the rules. Otherwise you might object to install a safety system in your car but then the big companies will lobby hard and you will have to use the Tesla/Google or Apple AI powered cars, then not only that he government will know all about your movement but the ad companies will know it too.

diragon 5y ago

Rust in Linux has a known constantly showing negative consequence: it introduces another language to the stack. Furthermore, Rust is quite different from C. This makes the whole massively more complicated, and increases the amount of knowledge needed to understand the whole. The same effect applies every time a new language is introduced, if it doesn't completely replace the previously used language. In this case, Rust won't. Zig might be a better fit, given how much more similar to C it is.

capableweb 5y ago
> Rust in Linux has a known constantly showing negative consequence It'd make your argument a lot stronger if you can actually list some of these negative consequences. "Another languages to the stack" and "Different than C" is just complaining about change because it is change. What negatives have already been shown that isn't just about "This isn't C"?
- rollcat 5y ago
  Mixing any two languages in any single code base creates significant friction at the boundaries, and adds new degrees of complexity in major areas (build system, tooling, debugging...). If we're talking about a project as complex as a production OS kernel, this kind of a decision should never be taken lightly. It's a much smaller step from 2 to 10 than from 1 to 2.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > It's a much smaller step from 2 to 10 than from 1 to 2. But here, you're already starting with 2: C and assembly. Besides inline assembly, a small but very important part of the Linux kernel is written in assembly on every architecture: the system call entry point (entry.S) and the kernel entry point (head.S). And if you consider each architecture's assembly as a separate language, it's more like 10 languages than 2 languages. I'm always impressed whenever I see changes to for instance signal handling or thread flags which touch not only the common code in C, but also the entry point assembly code for each one of the many architectures Linux supports; whoever does these changes need to not only know the assembly language for all these architectures, but also have at hand all the corresponding tooling and emulators to compile and test the changes.

jmull 5y ago

It seems pretty clear that rust in linux would reduce certain kinds of run-time bugs. What isn't so clear is whether, overall, rust improves linux or not. There's bad to be weighed against the good. Adding complexity strains and breaks processes, slowing development. Among other things, this means additional bugs and lets them survive longer, so it's not even clear rust is a win purely from a bug perspective.

paulddraper 5y ago

> The FUD around Rusting the kernel reminds me of similar sentiments surrounding autonomous vehicles That, but in the opposite direction. Decades of promises of self-driving cars. And still nothing able to drive without a driver. There have been small improvements...cars that have autonomous abilities in some cases. But overhauling the entire driving fleet of the world to use 5-year-old technology....it's not a realistic expectation. There are smaller, more practical expectations.

ben-schaaf 5y ago
> Decades of promises of self-driving cars. And still nothing able to drive without a driver. Waymo have driven 20 million miles autonomously since 2009, and as of late 2020 claim 74,000 of those were done completely driverless. They're still a far cry from being common, but they're here and they're impressively safe.
- shakow 5y ago
  But what is the “miles on straight-ahead, well-lit US highway” vs. “kms on random European regional road” ratio?
- paulddraper 5y ago
  > They're still a far cry from being common Sounds familiar

sidlls 5y ago

Then maybe the Rust community would be better served by not hyper-evangelizing it so much and at the same time bashing other languages? There's a perception issue here: people think that Rust people (not necessarily the maintainers or official evangelists, but the community at-large) think Rust is as close to perfect as you can get because of its safety features, because these people talk about Rust like it's a universal problem solver.

pjmlp 5y ago
I kind of agree, that is why you tend to see for-and-against comments from my side. Despite the plus sides, there are lots of incumbents, certain domains are better served by managed languages, and regardless of our wishes C and C++ have 50 years of history. Even if we stop writing new code in those languages today, Cobol shows us how long we would still need to keep them running anyway. Microsoft, for example, despite their newly found love with Rust, is full of job ads for C++ developers in green field applications.
moltonel3x 5y ago
This points to the larger perception issue that "anybody who advocates for Rust is part of the Rust community and/or knows Rust well". But there are many Rust evangelists who obviously don't know much about Rust (this is not Rust-specific, it's a common issue in tech). This kind of "positive FUD" is ultimately harmful, as outsiders understandably get tired of the hype and start ignoring any pro-Rust argument, good or bad. In my experience, the community of actual Rust users is much more level-headed. While most do love the language and the "this aspect of Rust is irrefutably better than the equivalent in $OTHERLANG" opinion occasionally pops up, the community seems pragmatic and well aware of Rust's cons. Case in point: the "should I use Rust" questions on the rust subreddit don't get dogmatic answers, and often result in "Rust isn't ideal for your use-case" advice.