The end of the kernel Rust experiment

I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: Let's forgive.

If it was being removed the title would be "An update on rust in the kernel"

I'm having deja Vu. Was there another quite similar headline here a few weeks or so ago?

It’s a bit clickbait-y, but the article is short, to the point, and frankly satisfying. If there is such a thing as good clickbait, then this might be it. Impressive work!

Well that's disappointing

C will always be the patrician's choice. No trendy language will appeal to the capable, enthusiastic programmer in the way that C does. "Safe" languages are, however, necessary in an age where "software engineer" is a blue collar career that attracts average graduates and immigrants. Consider that assembly written by a nerd in the 80s is likely safer than anything a mediocre modern developer can produce with all of the guardrails and training wheels available to them.

C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields).

Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has made a couple of decisions that make it hard for some of those architectures to be supported well. For example, Rust has decided that the array index type, the object size type, and the pointer size type are all the same type, which is not the case for a couple of architectures; it's also the case that things like segmented pointers don't really work in Rust (of course, they barely work in C, but barely is more than nothing).

Every system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.

I think it'll be less like telegram lines- which were replaced fully for a major upgrade in functionality, and more like rail lines- which were standardized and ubiquitous, still hold some benefit but mainly only exist in areas people don't venture nearly as much.

It’s available on more obscure platforms than Rust, and more people are familiar with it.

I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable that everything will be rewritten in Rust, at the very least this will this decades. C has been with us for more than half a century and is the foundation of pretty much everything, it will take a long time to migrate all that.

More likely is that they will live next to each other for a very, very long time.

That is why most of the world has not been using c/c++ for decades.