I don’t know who this “Linux community” is that doesn’t include Linus or Greg or other senior developers that have been working with the Rust for Linux folks for more than a year. They don’t think it’s “dead in the water”.
Let’s assume for a second that Linus knows what he’s doing. Now look at his mail from April 2021 on what he views as show stoppers (https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099) - OOM panics and 128-bit floating point. The former has been fixed now, which is why Linus appears bullish on adding Rust support to the kernel. Check that mail for the number of times Linus mentions GCC - 0. It’s not a priority for him.
It’s easy to see why. He (and everyone else involved) are very clear that this will only be used for driver code on architectures that were already supported. So therefore, there is no need to supply a GCC compiler in the short term.
I pointed out two long term efforts to get GCC Rust support. These could unblock more widespread use of Rust in the kernel, but that’s jumping the gun. Let’s see even one real driver merged before thinking about that.
Whatever happens, the Linux developers won’t let the project break for millions of users overnight. That’s not how they operate. Your “Linux community” should know that.
Let’s assume for a second that Linus knows what he’s doing. Now look at his mail from April 2021 on what he views as show stoppers (https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099) - OOM panics and 128-bit floating point. The former has been fixed now, which is why Linus appears bullish on adding Rust support to the kernel. Check that mail for the number of times Linus mentions GCC - 0. It’s not a priority for him.
It’s easy to see why. He (and everyone else involved) are very clear that this will only be used for driver code on architectures that were already supported. So therefore, there is no need to supply a GCC compiler in the short term.
I pointed out two long term efforts to get GCC Rust support. These could unblock more widespread use of Rust in the kernel, but that’s jumping the gun. Let’s see even one real driver merged before thinking about that.
Whatever happens, the Linux developers won’t let the project break for millions of users overnight. That’s not how they operate. Your “Linux community” should know that.