Consider 0patch before you give up on windows. They do good work and it’s real affordable.

No matter what you do, in this circumstance it’s worth keeping that windows partition around.

I do think whatever you use is the right choice though.

E: I looked up the 0patch pricing and you get a year of patches for a bunch of eol versions of windows like 7 and 10 for $25 a year. It’s a good deal I think for people who don’t want to or can’t upgrade to 11, and they beat Microsoft to a bunch of zero day exploits.

I know you said it’s a no money kind of situation but I really think when ten is still a possibility theres two bucks and some change a month in the budget.

Yes, literally include the wrapper code in every rust driver that needs it then when you push the wrapper on its own you can say “this code is currently duplicated 900 times because there isn’t a rust wrapper” not “this would make it easier for hypothetical rust drivers that might hypothetically exist in the future” and no one will bat an eye!

That’s how you get things added to the kernel!

If it was about adding rust code to the kernel, which is what r4l universally says they’re doing, then they’d be taking that approach instead of farting around with the chicken and egg problem trying to get rust everything first.

That’s the whole point of the part of my comment that you dismissed out of hand. They’re nearly universally behaving in a way that it takes actual concerted brainpower to read as anything other than duplicitous.

And then when people say “hey, why don’t you not act like that” you get responses like “Linus said we could!” And “nontechnical nonsense” and “Dino devs”.

I don’t think that’s a broken foundation.

This is where you lose me. I’m not a good programmer or a very smart person, but I have enough experience with c, c++ and rust to know that those wrappers don’t need to be in the kernel if the kernel has c bindings.

If I were writing something in rust I could just include the r4l wrapper for the kernels c bindings and everything would work fine. The wrapper doesn’t need to be in the kernel.

There’s a fundamental disconnect here. When people speaking about r4l including official statements from the r4l project say “our plan to add rust, a language intended to address shortcomings of c, to the kernel is only for new code, not a rewrite of existing systems.” I don’t believe them.

Not only do supporters of and contributors to the r4l project make offhanded remarks about how different things would be better if they were written in rust but if they truly believed in the language’s superiority to c then they would be trying to replace existing c code with rust.

Then the whole rust using and supporting world melts down when people oppose adding it into an existing huge c codebase.

Then they all complain that they’re being discriminated against for “nontechnical reasons”, which is becoming a great dog whistle for if you should just disregard someone’s opinion on rust outright.

Perhaps that explains some of why I don’t believe rust people when they flip out over not being allowed to do the thing that no one else is allowed to do either.

So why can’t rust modules use the c bindings?

What im building towards is: if r4l isn’t about replacing c code then it doesn’t need to be in the kernel. If its about replacing c code (which it absolutely should be, that’s the whole point of memory safe languages like rust) then r4l people need to have a clear process and understanding of how they expect to accomplish that goal and be open about it.

Okay so if the point of the rust for Linux project isn’t to replace c code with rust then what is the point?

I understand the project maintains a coy line regarding that question but let’s be serious for a second and really consider why r4l is happening.

You’ve brought this up in several comments. given the situation, what do you think is the answer to replacing a huge c codebase with rust under the specific conditions of Linux development (open source, overwhelmingly maintained by 9-5 lifers employed by disparate organizations, in use everywhere for everything) when maintainers say they’ll oppose it?

Microsoft made the news a year or so ago announcing a rewrite of some libraries in rust, but conditions and limitations in Redmond are very different than those faced by the kernel team.

Why are you considering degoogling?

What would make you unsafe? What data do you want to keep away from Facebook?