Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?

Posted Aug 16, 2019 15:06 UTC (Fri) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624)
In reply to: Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler? by mathstuf
Parent article: Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?

It will be interesting to see Writing A Kernel Driver in Rust at the upcoming Linux Plumbers Conference. From what I have seen, things like split counters, sequence locks, and base RCU (as opposed to RCU use cases like RcuCell) have been carefully avoided in earlier Rust-language Linux-kernel drivers. Maybe they will take them head-on in this talk. Either way, looking forward to it!

I agree that encapsulating difficult-to-get-right things into libraries is a most excellent strategy where it applies, but there are often things that don't fit well into a safe API. Again, I find a number of Rust's approaches to be of interest, but I do not believe that Rust is quite there yet. As I have said in other forums, my current feeling is that current Rust is to the eventual low-level concurrency language as DEC Alpha is to modern microprocessors.