The experiment of Rust in the Linux kernel has come to a successful end.
After several months in which Many Linux kernel developers opposed removing the tag. of «experimental» of this programming language, in favor of the popular C, it seems that the balance has tipped towards Rust.
As confirmed in LWN, in a brief announcement, during the annual Maintainers Summit conference, which brings together the large community of Linux developers, this label disappears and Rust becomes another kernel language of this system.
The first changes so that The Linux kernel will support Rust started 3 years ago and, since then, this programming language has become one of the most beloved in the community.
In just this time, numerous aspects of Linux have been improved thanks to this, since improves protection against memory access errorsbuffer overflow or different problems with processes.
Besides, Linux thus seeks to position itself as an attractive option for younger or less experienced developers, due to the accessibility of Rust.
Although it is a partial victory, since the C programming language is behind practically all the processes that occur in the Linux kernel, so the community will have to adapt many to Rustto avoid problems.
It should be noted that he has been immersed in the development of Rust to coexist with C on Linux from the beginning. Miguel Ojeda, a Spanish software engineer who started the Rust for Linux project to make this possible.
Today, it is the only maintainer of Rust for Linux, along with reviewersfollowing the departure previously of other big names behind this feat, such as Wedson Almeida Filho in 2023 and Alex Gaynor more recently.
The first of these, due to the absurd battle against the staunch followers of Cquit his job so he wouldn’t have to deal with «non-technical nonsense,» as he shared on the Linux kernel mailing list.
«I’m retiring from the project,» he announced then. «After almost 4 years, I no longer have the energy or enthusiasm to respond to non-technical noise. «I’d rather leave this in the hands of those who still have it.»
Next, the developer assured that the community had to move towards memory-safe languagesand not stay in the same context, at the risk of the same thing happening that happened with Unix.
«I firmly believe that the future of kernels lies in secure languages in memory,» he stressed. «If Linux does not adopt it internally, I fear that another kernel will do with it what Linux did with Unix.»
In any case, The Spanish developer continues in this project which, for all the celebrations, is no longer «experimental».