Analysis
Rust in the Linux kernel, five years on
The experiment was supposed to settle an argument about memory safety. It has mostly settled a different argument about maintainer capacity.
By Staff Writer7 min read
Section E
1 story
Software
Languages, kernels, frameworks and the maintenance burden nobody costs.
Opening of Rust in the Linux kernel, five years on
Counted in merged lines, Rust in the kernel is a modest success. Counted in maintainer hours, it is an expensive one. Both facts are true and the second gets discussed less.
Driver subsystems took it first, which was always the plan, drivers are numerous, relatively self-contained, and disproportionately represented in the memory-safety bug data. Several are now shipping with Rust implementations in mainline, and the class of bug they were meant to eliminate has, in those drivers, been eliminated.
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Elsewhere in the paper
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