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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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One detail about Rust in the kernel that often gets overlooked: the Linux kernel supports arches to which Rust has never been ported. Most of these are marginal (hppa, alpha, m68k—itanium was also on this list), but there are people out there who still use them and may be concerned about their future. As long as Rust remains in device drivers only this isn't a major issue, but if it penetrates further into the kernel, these arches will have to be desupported.
(Gentoo has a special profile "feature" called "wd40" for these arches, which is how I was aware of their lack of Rust support. It's interesting to look at the number and types of packages it masks. Lotta python there, and it looks like gnome is effectively a no-go.)
It seems like gcc rust would pretty much fix that issue, since soon gcc will be able to compile rust for any architecture gcc supports.
Assuming that it works out, yes, this might fix the problem. On the other hand, I remember gcj, which kind of quietly vanished after a while, so I prefer to reserve judgement until gcc's Rust implementation is ready for production use.
We are all such dorks.
You say that as though it's a bad thing. 😆
The gccrust and rustc frontend for gcc projects aim to address that.
Or wait for rust to support the extra languages. With LLVM adding new architectures or projects like gccrs. But all of these options are a way out and rust will remain device driver only for a long time I suspect - it is still experimental after all. I would hope that as rust in the kernel matures so do the available architectures that rust supports.