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> Projects in C/C++ seem to be making much faster progress eg. SerenityOS than the Rust community. What is holding Rust back in this area? This is a genuine que
by Zababa 4y ago
> Projects in C/C++ seem to be making much faster progress eg. SerenityOS than the Rust community. What is holding Rust back in this area? This is a genuine question, not intending to inflame the discussion.
I think one element is manpower. I don't know how many people are at good enough with Rust to write some kernel code, but I'm almost certain that it's way less than the people that can write kernel code in C or C++. C is 51 years old, C++ 38 years old, Rust 12 years old. It is possible for an enterprise-grade, production ready kernel written in Rust to exist. That still leaves the task of actually writing it.
- toast0 4y agoIt's not necessarily just ability, but also availability of jobs. Lots of places need people to help tweak the kernel they run on, so lots of Linux kernel jobs and some BSD kernel jobs, but no jobs to tweak the Rust kernel that doesn't exist yet. Gotta have some real commitment to pay people to build a new kernel from scratch, knowing that it's gonna take a long time to get anything useful.
- nineteen999 4y agoI think this is a real factor. Rust is winning over C/C++ devs to some degree, who are switching to it or adding it to their skillset, but C/C++ devs probably still outnumber them by a factor of, what 10:1? 20:1? Only some of those C/C++ devs have a background in OSDev as well. I suspect though that Rust is also getting a lot of its fanbase from the Go crowd, or other languages from the webdev side, where there isn't really strong hardware and OSdev skills to begin with.