linux-kernel - Re: Rust kernel policy

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Message-ID: <20250220160424.GA66570@nvidia.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:04:24 -0400
From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@...dia.com>
To: Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>, "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Kees Cook <kees@...nel.org>,
	Miguel Ojeda <miguel.ojeda.sandonis@...il.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	rust-for-linux <rust-for-linux@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	David Airlie <airlied@...il.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	ksummit@...ts.linux.dev
Subject: Re: Rust kernel policy

On Thu, Feb 20, 2025 at 07:53:28AM +0100, Greg KH wrote:
> C++ standard committee recently AND the proposal from Google about
> Carbon, a way to evolve a C++ codebase into something else that is
> maintainable and better overall.  I recommend reading at least the
> introduction here:
> 	https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/
> for details, and there are many other summaries like this one that go
> into more:
> 	https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/02/carbon-is-not-a-language/

That resonates with me alot more than the Rust experiment does:

  Carbon is a concentrated experimental effort to develop tooling that
  will facilitate automated large-scale long-term migrations of
  existing C++ code to a modern, well-annotated programming language
  with a modern, transparent process of evolution and governance
  model.
 [..]
  Many so-called "successor languages" are nothing like
  this. They don't make automated code migration an explicit
  goal, and generally build a layer of abstraction on top of or rely on
  their host language.

This approach provides a vision where the entire kernel could be
piece-by-piece mostly-mechanically converted from C into Carbon and
then hand touched up bit by bit to have better safety. It is so much
more compatible with our existing processes and social order. A single
language outcome after tremendous effort.

It is shame it isn't v1.0 right now, and may never work out, but it
sure is a much more compelling vision.

Jason