> Maybe be an upstream for Android and the various corporate kernels.
> A soft fork might clarify things like the old gcc fork did.
Nice idea but in practice there is absolutely no chance that this would be a successful strategy for those people in favor of Rust.
Being out of mainline tree would perpetually put Rust in the "future" (like Nuclear Fusion -- always just "20 years away"). Meanwhile Linux would continue to evolve in ways that could be very disruptive for Rust integration. For example, Rust interop needs to think very carefully about locks, memory order etc. Any change in the mainline kernel could really mess the assumptions made in the Rust fork. A year or two of evolution of the slightly independent evolution of the two branches may make it almost impossible to merge the two.
Only companies as large as Google could maintain the Android fork. The RFL team is small and I don't think large vendors would like to invest their time and energy on forks. Who would pick up and package the fork ? Red Hat ? Debian ? Arch ? They are already complaining about compilation and maintainability of Rust when it is in the mainline kernel. No chance that they start using the down stream rust kernel in their main kernels.
The only way Rust for Linux succeeds is if it has the blessing and push from Greg/Linus.
> A soft fork might clarify things like the old gcc fork did.
Nice idea but in practice there is absolutely no chance that this would be a successful strategy for those people in favor of Rust.
Being out of mainline tree would perpetually put Rust in the "future" (like Nuclear Fusion -- always just "20 years away"). Meanwhile Linux would continue to evolve in ways that could be very disruptive for Rust integration. For example, Rust interop needs to think very carefully about locks, memory order etc. Any change in the mainline kernel could really mess the assumptions made in the Rust fork. A year or two of evolution of the slightly independent evolution of the two branches may make it almost impossible to merge the two.
Only companies as large as Google could maintain the Android fork. The RFL team is small and I don't think large vendors would like to invest their time and energy on forks. Who would pick up and package the fork ? Red Hat ? Debian ? Arch ? They are already complaining about compilation and maintainability of Rust when it is in the mainline kernel. No chance that they start using the down stream rust kernel in their main kernels.
The only way Rust for Linux succeeds is if it has the blessing and push from Greg/Linus.