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Drivers seem to be a sweet spot for Rust's focus on safety. Is there a reason why greenfield drivers shouldn't be written in Rust?

• skavi 4y ago
  the main issue for the project mentioned in the link seemed to be the lack of placement new.
  • unrealhoang 4y ago
    Also some of the features used for kernel development are not in stable Rust yet.
    • steveklabnik 4y ago
      The Linux project seems to be treating those as the same as any C extensions they use, that is, they're just using them, even though they aren't yet stable. Folks are of course working on getting those things to be stable someday, but it's not considered a blocker for this stuff to have landed.
  • Tuna-Fish 4y ago
    Another is the build infrastructure. Right now, you can only use Rust on platforms that the official Rust compiler compiles for, which is a lot narrower set than where Linux runs. The long-term solution for this are the various GCC Rust projects, but those are still ways out. Correspondingly, there are a lot of kernel subsystems where Rust is not welcome until those projects mature.