Rustaceans at the border [LWN.net]

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 8:30 UTC (Fri) by seanyoung (subscriber, #28711)
Parent article: Rustaceans at the border

Jonathan Corbet, I must say I am disappointed with the reporting on rust. Rust is an entirely new language with many interesting properties, memory safety for example and just how expressive the language is.

Instead we get an article which almost uniquely focusses on the ability to pull in external crates, which is always going to be controversial for a kernel.

A lot of us kernel hackers will need to learn how to use rust in the kernel. How about something a bit more in-depth?

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Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 8:35 UTC (Fri) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link] (2 responses)

> A lot of us kernel hackers will need to learn how to use rust in the kernel. How about something a bit more in-depth?

Let me google that for you...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alwn.net%20rust&...

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 8:46 UTC (Fri) by seanyoung (subscriber, #28711) [Link] (1 responses)

Nothing in depth to see there.

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 13:29 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

https://lwn.net/Articles/869428/ might have something for you.

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 10:39 UTC (Fri) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link]

Um, that's the subject that the kernel mailing list threads he was reporting on were about? As in, that's a subject that kernel developers are currently discussing, which is why it's worth summarising now.

What?

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 12:02 UTC (Fri) by kay (guest, #1362) [Link]

I'm in contrast are completely happy with the lwn covering of rust. If I want to learn developing in Rust I wouldn't expect lwn as place to go Ym2C

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 13:11 UTC (Fri) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

Seconded; we see lots of Python technical articles but I don't think there's much chance to have some parts of the kernel written in it anytime soon ... it'd be nice to have at least some example of where Rust shines for kernel dev (some obvious ones: getting rid of void*, and getting rid of "if (myptr != NULL)").

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 15, 2022 16:47 UTC (Fri) by thoughtpolice (subscriber, #87455) [Link]

That's because it's the topic of the mailing list discussion.

You can quite literally find dozens of articles about using Rust for things like kernel/bare metal programming if that's what you want. It's actually so easy I'm not sure why you're bothering to complain here. But regardless of complaints, it's not what the topic of the discussion is about, though.

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 19, 2022 12:17 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a lot of Rust learning material available, among many other good sources (in no particular order)

https://www.rust-lang.org/learn

https://cheats.rs

https://github.com/ctjhoa/rust-learning

https://tourofrust.com/

https://this-week-in-rust.org/

https://docs.rs/

https://dhghomon.github.io/easy_rust/

https://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/rust-module-system/

https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings

https://practice.rs/why-exercise.html

https://forge.rust-lang.org/

https://lborb.github.io/book/title-page.html

https://fasterthanli.me/

Rustaceans at the border

Posted Apr 21, 2022 2:23 UTC (Thu) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link]

A couple of things listed in that second-last URL (The Little Book of Rust Books) that I'd like to call out as relevant:

I generally recommend Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists as the next step after https://www.rust-lang.org/learn because it helps to solidify in your mind what ownership and borrowing actually mean for implementing data structures.
Learn Rust the Dangerous Way is helpful for learning Rust from the perspective of a C programmer by translating some C into equivalent but ugly and un-idiomatic Rust code that the compiler can't help much to verify and then cleaning it up.