If this happens, and it seems inevitable at the moment, I personally see this resulting in a potential decline of a Linux kernel in the next few years. Just a

If this happens, and it seems inevitable at the moment, I personally see this resulting in a potential decline of a Linux kernel in the next few years. Just a few questions off top of my head: * How much will it affect the development velocity? Existing devs (and maintainers) will at least need to learn how to read and debug Rust code. New devs will likely have no good competences in C which is 99% of the codebase so how good/quickly will they be able to blend in? * How many existing kernel developers will community potentially loose because of the increased complexity? * How much new talent will it actually be able to attract? Now people will need to learn two completely different languages and their vastly different ecosystems. * Does Rust have high enough entry bar to produce competent kernel developers? Sometimes high entry bar acts as a very good filter to end up in a pool with a highly skilled (and motivated) engineers. * Coordination of development efforts is now going to become much more complex. This includes writing new features (C or Rust or both?), maintaining the old ones (rewrite pieces in Rust or not?) but also code-reviews which will now pose a bigger challenge given that it will consist of mixed Rust+C code. Having worked in codebases which mixed C and C++, I already understand what kind of issues mixing C and Rust is going to produce. And I expect them to be much more accentuated because distance(C, C++) << distance(C, Rust).