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A very obvious one is that by adding another language, you are adding more complexity.

It's not as if C is going to disappear from the kernel as it's something like 25 million lines of C code, and if Rust was to be supported, the current C experts who are maintaining various subsystems will now also have to become Rust experts, so that they can effectively accept or reject code contributions in that language.

Personally it just seems illogical, better to make a new kernel in Rust is you really want to use that language, than converting small parts of a HUGE C kernel. Google has been pushing for the inclusion of Rust into the kernel, it's weird that they are not writing their own shiny new Fuchsia OS kernel in Rust, instead of C++.




Another way is to sponsor and help to develop Redox OS[1] instead. It has a kernel completely written in idiomatic Rust[2].

[1] https://redox-os.org/

[2] https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/kernel


It's funny how frequent people bring this up, but the truth is simple, check here [1]. Zircon kernel is not new [2], it has been in development for a while now. By the time the started to work on the microkernel, Rust 1.0 was really new, so they would've to implement several things from ground up. There's a implementation of Zircon in rust called zCore [3], but I don't know how stable and feature complete this one is.

[1] https://twitter.com/cpugoogle/status/1397265884251525122

[2] Like a two years project.

[3] https://github.com/rcore-os/zCore




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