Absolutely, I understand why these systems are there. And see the issue. The problem is the rapid propagation of them. There's too many, and they live outside the purvey of the distribution management, and often (... NPM, etc.) have poor auditing and moderation.
I see why they happen. I don't blame the people to make them. I just think it's a potentially awkward situation when it comes to something as core as the kernel; which has traditionally only required GCC.
Rapid propagation? Fully statically linked binaries have been a thing for decades. The practice only got broken under most Linux distros when glibc decided to make it impossible to be linked against statically.
> I just think it's a potentially awkward situation when it comes to something as core as the kernel; which has traditionally only required GCC.
Clang is starting to leapfrog GCC here. IIRC, some features are better supported and/or more advanced on Clang, other features (e.g. LTO) are exclusive to it. Not to mention it's almost a certainty for Clang to land kernel PGO support long before GCC, in fact Google already uses it in production Android kernels.
Anyway, rust or not, linux is being decoupled from GCC.
I see why they happen. I don't blame the people to make them. I just think it's a potentially awkward situation when it comes to something as core as the kernel; which has traditionally only required GCC.