Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he’s had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.
From Wedon’s post on the kernel mailing list:
I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.
…
I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.
Lastly, I’ll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 – and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."
I admit I’m biased towards C-languages out of sheer personal preference and limited exposure to Rust but I am wondering, are there any major technical barriers to Rust replacing these languages in it’s current form anymore?
I know there has been a lot of movement towards supporting Rust in the last 6 years since I’ve become aware of it, but I also get flashbacks from the the early 00’s when I would hear about how Java was destined to replace C++, and the early 2010’s when Python was destined to replace everything only to realize that the hype fundamentally misunderstood the use case limitations of the various languages.
This is a little off topic and admittedly an oversimplification, but people saying Rust’s memory safety isn’t a big deal remind me of people saying static typing isn’t a big deal.
I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing? If you ask me the GNU people are missing a trick. Perhaps if they rewrote Hurd in Rust they could finally shed that “/Linux”.
Who the fuck is this little shit? Can’t they even be a little considerate towards rust? Just because they have 15 years worth of inertia for C doesn’t mean they can close their eyes and say “nope, I’m not interested”. I do not see how the kernel can survive without making rust a first class citizen
It’s Ted Ts’o, the maintainer of the ext4 filesystem amongst other things.
little shit
Though you’re still accurate despite his seniority.
There’s really only one valid response to Ted Ts’o:
If you think you can do better with C, prove it.
CVE-2024-42304 — crash from undocumented function parameter invariants
CVE-2024-40955 — out of bounds read
CVE-2024-0775 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-2513 — use-after-free
CVE-2023-1252 — use-after-free
CVE-2022-1184 — use-after-free
CVE-2020-14314 — out of bounds read
CVE-2019-19447 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10879 — use-after-free
CVE-2018-10878 — out of bounds write
CVE-2018-10881 — out of bounds read
CVE-2015-8324 — null pointer dereference
CVE-2014-8086 — race condition
CVE-2011-2493 — call function pointer in uninitialized struct
CVE-2009-0748 — null pointer dereferenceYou seem really invested in pointing out those shortcomings. I respect that.
Arrogant hypocrites are a pet peeve of mine. If someone is going to act like progressive technology changes are beneath them and unnecessary, they should be able to put their money where their mouth is.
The video attached is a perfect example of the kind of “I’m not prepared to learn anything new so everyone else is wrong” attitude that is eating away at Linux like a cancer.
If memory safety isn’t adopted into the kernel, and C fanaticism discarded, Linux will face the same fate as the kernels it once replaced. Does the Linux foundation want to drag its heels and stuff millions into AI ventures whilst sysadmins quietly shift to new kernels that offer memory safety, or does it want to be part of that future?
If Linux gets rewritten in Rust it will be a new kernel, not Linux. You can make new kernels, even in Rust but they aren’t Linux. You can advertise them at Linux conferences but you can’t force every Linux dev to work on your new Rust kernel.
the crew on the Ship of Theseus would like a word with you. Because if you strip out every subsystem and replace them with a different language, everyone would still call it Linux and it would still work as Linux.
Linux isn’t “a bunch of C code” it’s an API, an ABI, and a bunch of drivers bundled into a monorepo.
Linux is a development ecosystem. If everyone agrees to switch to Rust it can switch to Rust with continuity. But they won’t.
Oof, that video… I don’t have enough patience to put up with that sort of thing either. I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.
It’s always been this way. Except that it was kernel developers arguing with kernel developers over C code. Now it’s relative newcomers arguing with kernel developers over Rust code that the kernel devs don’t necessarily care about. Of course it’s going to be a mess.
A fork is of course possible, but operating systems are huge and very complex, you really don’t want to alienate these folks that have been doing exclusively this for 30 years. It would be hard to keep the OS commercially viable with a smaller group and having to do both the day to day maintenance, plus the rewrite. It’s already difficult as it is currently.
Rust will be a huge success in time, long after the current names have lost their impetus. This is not a “grind for 4 years and it’s done” project.
folks that have been doing this exclusively for 30 years
And yet the number of people I hear “just switch to Linux!” When the other person has been using Windows for 30 years blows my mind.
Inertia is a hell of a drug.
I wouldn’t tell a Windows developer with 30 years experience to just switch to developing for Linux.
Users are different. Most people who have used Windows for 30 years never touch anything outside of the desktop, taskbar and Explorer.
That person in the audience was really grinding my gears. Just let the folks you’re talking to answer you; no need to keep going on your diatribe when it’s based on a false assumption and waste the whole room’s time.
let’s not lose focus of what’s important here, and that is a room full of people hearing my voice and paying attention to me for as long as I manage to hold it
Removed by mod
At rhe beginning, I did hate it. Now I slowly embrace it as it seems like a feature to be mkre verbose.
But maybe it will never change and I will just gaslight myself liking it. Whatever… you cant take my fun away learning rust for half a year
Removed by mod
I hate how I can’t do everything I imagine in rust.
But researching about why something isn’t possible, makes me realize that the code should never be wroten like the way I did… so I can’t blame rust for dissallowing me this.
People are dumb as hell, it’s fucking open source, go maintain the c fork, and let the those who want to improve the fucking shit cve producing codebase make a rust fork. And see which one people will use, and we all know that the rust fork will have wider adoption, it’s a no brainer.
No one is forcing them to maintain the Linux kernel, no one is telling them to stop writing patches, they can’t because you can download the code and work on it as you like.
It’s people who know they will be irrelevant because they spent decades producing shit software, and they can’t even be bothered to learn a new language to improve stability and security for the whole fucking userbase. Give me a break, what a bunch of whiners.
This is such a dumb take. For as much as I’d like to have a safer language in the kernel you need the current developers, the “big heads” at least because they have a lot of niche knowledge about their domains and how they implementation works (regardless of language) People shouldn’t take shit like this from the ext4 developer, but it doesn’t mean we should start vilifying all of them.
This guy’s concerns are real and valid but were expressed with the maturity of a lunatic child, but they are not all like this.
Yes and the big heads in this case don’t want to share that knowledge, because why? Because they are treating the kernel like their pet project that they own and control, and they don’t wanna lose that control, rather looking at the bigger picture.
It’s kinda obvious that rust is the way forward as google has clearly shown, so why are they gatekeeping?
When did they refuse to share knowledge?
That was what he was talking about at the conference, he literally asked for help about how things work, so he could write better APIs that they are more comfortable using.
But the response was we don’t want to write rust.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t involve C programmers writing Rust?
There’s is no other way, C is a security issue - do you understand?
So you want to force C programmers to write Rust or GTFO.
There’s always going to be pushback on new ideas. He’s basically asking people questions like “Hey how does your thing work? I want to write it in rust.” and gets the answer “I’m not going to learn rust.”.
I think rust is generally a good thing and with a good amount of tests to enforce behavior it’s possible to a functionally equivalent copy of the current code with no memory issues in future maintenance of it. Rewriting things in rust will also force people to clarify the behavior and all possible theoretical paths a software can take.
I’m not gonna lie though, if I would have worked on software for 20 years and people would introduce component that’s written in another language my first reaction would be “this feels like a bad idea and doesn’t seem necessary”.
I really hope that the kernel starts taking rust seriously, it’s a great tool and I think it’s way easier to write correct code in rust than C. C is simple but lacks the guardrails of modern languages which rust has.
The process of moving to rust is happening but it’s going to take a really long time. It’s a timescale current maintainers don’t really need to worry about since they’ll be retired anyway.
From a developer standpoint you’re taking someone’s baby, cloning it into a language they don’t understand and deprecating the original. Worse, if you’re not actually interested in taking over the project you’ve now made it abandonware because the original developer lost heart and the person looking for commit counts on GitHub has moved on.
Obviously these extremes don’t always apply, but a lot of open source relies on people taking a personal interest. If you destroy that, you might just destroy the project.
I apologize if this is more nontechnical nonsense as Im not a coder, but if the projects are open source, cant he just read and translate the code?
For the same reason spoken languages often have semantic structures that make a literal translation often cumbersome and incorrect, translating nontrivial code from one language into another without being a near expert in both langauges, as well as being an expert in the project in question, can lead to differences in behaviour varying from “it crashes and takes down the OS with it”, to “it performs worse”.
I’ll add that even when you’re an expert in both languages, it’s common to see WTF’s in the original and not be sure if something is a bug or just weird behavior that’s now expected. Especially when going from a looser to a more strict language.
I’ve translated huge projects and most of the risk is in “you know the original would do the wrong thing in these x circumstances – I’m pretty sure that’s not on purpose but… Maybe? Or maybe now someone depends on it being wrong like this?”
Even if you wrote the code yourself you can come back to it a while later and have a wtf moment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
