written in Rust.
Comment on Maestro, a Linux compatible kernel written in Rust.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Why?
Limitless_screaming@kbin.social 10 months ago
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And …why?
leanleft@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
"In kernel development, debugging is very hard for several reasons:
- Documentation is often hard to find, and BIOS implementations may be flawed (more often than you would think)
- On boot, the kernel has full access to the memory and is allowed to write where it should not (its own code, for example)
- Troubleshooting memory leaks is not easy. Tools such as valgrind cannot be used
- gdb can be used with QEMU and VMWare, but the kernel may have a different behaviour when running on a different emulator or virtual machine. Also, those emulators may not support gdb (example VirtualBox)
- Some features in the support for gdb in QEMU or VMWare are missing and gdb might even crash sometimes
All those issues are reasons for using a memory-safe language, to avoid them as much as possible.
Overall, the use of Rust in the kernel allowed for the implementation of a lot of safeguards. And I believe that it is, to this day, the best decision I have made for this project.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Contributing to Linux can be extremely daunting. Refactoring can be as well. Rust makes both of those a LOT easier. If a project is written in Rust instead of C there will be many more potential contributors and flexibility.
Adanisi@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
And Rust has a restrictive trademark policy which could theoretically cause problems.
Just, why, Mozilla?
VicentAdultman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
He answers that in the project page. Just because there are kernels available, he can’t build his own and learn about kernel and computers in general (the answer for your question)