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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Not an expert in both the languages but I heard that C developers are trained to use memory smartly, sometimes even reuse a range of allocated memory for completely different purpose to save cycles freeing and reallocating. But for Rust developers, everything is about making sure when one should get the hand away from the memory, and whose memory is allowed to be touched.
Sounds to me like sharing rides that maximise economically but we may have some oops moments sitting on someone's laps vs absolute private rides to make sure no one in your family will be harmed but we have to make sure everyone gets a car only when needed.
It is quite interesting to see how it will work out eventually...
Kernel coders are an entirely different breed, and when I worked with a few of them they were just stunning. The smartest man I know on the planet so far coded on the Unix kernel -- the one that IBM forced back to Novell who'd already fired their staff after selling it, and thus shelved it and killed Unix. He is and was amazing.
So yes, I can confirm that Kernel devs know how to manage their memory -- they use very little, they allocate and free it, and they build very small, tight, optimized kernels by knowing how the optimizer will do things and how to hint it to do what they know needs to happen.
Yeah, it's a skill. Yeah, it takes skilled people. I'd like to one day find out that really big training wheels will let anyone build code that well, but I've seen the goal and I don't expect we're there yet.
Let the kernel be built by kernel devs.
But on the other hand you can’t expect some smaller and smaller subset of the population to primarily just learn C and meet the criteria of a kernel dev.
I absolutely agree with all your points, and most rust devs would agree, but the general idea is that over time that energy (which would have been spent tweaking malloc and such) should be spent on the rust compiler and memory management systems, which is already magic as someone who as written a lot of c, c++, and spent the better part of a year learning rust. (I’m no expert of course, but I have a pretty decent grasp on the low level memory management of both the Linux kernel and the rust compiler).
So that over time the effort that would be spent on memory management and kernel functionality can be properly divided. Rust not being efficient somewhere in catching memory faults or managing memory? Fix it. Someone writing unsafe rust code? Fix it.
I think at the end of the day everyone wants the same thing which is a memory safe kernel, and I think that rust Is being shoehorned into kernel projects too early in places where it shouldn’t be, but I also think there is unnatural resistance to it just because it’s different elsewhere to "how it's always been done."