A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 26, 2025 10:13 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
In reply to: A prediction with no data to support it by jengelh
Parent article: A change in maintenance for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer

This would most likely be true for any language that is not C. In this particular stir, Hellwig even called out that he believes that the kernel will become unmaintainable if it is a cross-language codebase and that it is not about Rust specifically: https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250128092334.GA28548@lst.de/

A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 26, 2025 10:56 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

The argument has probably been made before: There are plenty of projects which combine two languages. C & ASM is a somewhat common combination, as seems to be C & C++, or C & (compiled) Python bindings, or $could_be_anything & a non-compiled set of Python/Perl/Shell/tcl files (hi Git!). Those projects seem to be doing fine, though arguably, none casually comes close to the size (LOC-wise) of Linux. Sometimes, such projects are "split in two", e.g. glib and glibmm.

I guess we'll find out sooner or later, for the lovely price of one Linux project. And perhaps we can then tell everybody "I told you so" (or not).

A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 26, 2025 12:12 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

And what's wrong with combining multiple languages - PROVIDED THE INTERFACES ARE CLEARLY DEFINED ?

And how many (especially language) projects are bootstrapped in one language, and then rewritten in another?

I suspect the big impact Rust will (and already is) hav(ing) on the kernel, is to force people to clearly define the interfaces. And that has to be a good thing, no?

Cheers,
Wol

A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 26, 2025 20:56 UTC (Wed) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

> And how many (especially language) projects are bootstrapped in one language, and then rewritten in another?

typically Rust, which was originally written in OCaml :-D

A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 26, 2025 12:19 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

I'm fully in favor of multi-language projects and often work on such projects for work. I just wanted to point out that the stir caused by Hellwig was not about Rust, but about multi-language projects.

A prediction with no data to support it

Posted Feb 28, 2025 0:37 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

In fact, the Linux kernel is one of the projects written in C and assembly. It doesn't run into the multi-language problem because the assembly is restricted to places where C is impractical, and nobody is threatening to rip out functioning C code to replace it with assembly.