Probably a few reasons. For Darwin, there are a few small projects but I think they are all functionally dead. The benefit with Linux, or even the BSDs here is, sure you gotta port to the hardware, but you should get a good set of user land stuff running for 'free' after that. Lots of programs just need to be compiled to target arm64 and they will at the very minimum function a little bit. Then you can have package maintainers help improve that. I don't think any of the open source Darwin based projects got far enough to build anything in user land. So you'd probably just get the Darwin code from Apple, figure out how to build it and then build everything else on top of it.
The BSDs. You can fork a BSD. Maybe he could try to mainline into the BSD, but would probably face a similar battle with the BSDs. Right, one again, the benefit mainlining into linux, and there is some (maybe limited) support to include Rust, is you can narrow your scope. You don't need to worry as much about some things because they will just sorta work, I am thinking like upper layers of the kernel. You have a CPU scheduler and some subsystems that, may not be as optimized for the hardware, but at least it is something and you can focus on other things before coming around to the CPU scheduler. You can fork a BSD, but most would probably consider it a hard fork. I also don't think any of the BSDs have developers who are that interested in brining in Rust. Some people have mentioned it, but as far as I know, nothing is in the works to mainline any kind of Rust support in the BSD kernels. So he would probably meet similar resistance if he tried to work with FreeBSD. OpenBSD isn't really open to Rust at all.
Why insist on developing in Rust? I mean, I see how it's much cooler and actually better than something like C, but people are hugely underestimating how difficult it is to change the established language of a 3 decade old project.
If Rust is the point you get up from the bed in the morning, why don't you focus on Redox and make it the new Linux? Redox today is much more than Linux was in 1991 so it's not like you would be starting from scratch.
You're probably not as good as Linus in, well, anything related to this field really. The only way to find out whether you actually are is to do the work. Note that also he spent a lot of time whining to people who were perceived as the powerful in the field. But in addition to whining he went and did the work and proved those people wrong.
Mind you, I'm a PHP developer by day, so this Rust-vs-C debate and memory management stuff is not something I've had experience with personally, but the "Rust is magical" section towards the bottom seems like a good summary of why the developer chose to use Rust.
Oh no, I totally agree. I am just saying from the perspective of the Asahi Linux project and wanting to use as much Rust as they can, that is what they are facing and the associated trade offs.
I personally fall a little more on the side of the Linux kernel C devs. Inter-oping languages and such does bring in a lot of complications. And the burden is on the Rust devs to prove it out over the long haul. And yes, that is an uphill battle, and it isn't the first time. Tons of organizations go through these pains. Being someone who works in a .NET shop, transitioning from .NET Framework to .NET core slowly is an uphill battle. And that's technically not even a language change!
But I do agree, Redox would probably less friction and a better route if you want to get into OS dev on an already existing project and be able to go "balls to the walls" with Rust. But you also run into, Redox just has a lot less of everything. That is just because it's a small project.
