Rust in the NetBSD Kernel, and other odd decisions
a day ago
- #NetBSD
- #Kernel Development
- #Rust
- The email discusses a question about NetBSD's potential adoption of Rust in the kernel, similar to FreeBSD's consideration.
- The author questions the motive behind FreeBSD's Rust adoption, suggesting it's more about memory-safety than appealing to younger developers.
- NetBSD has previously incorporated Lua into the kernel for rapid development and prototyping of kernel drivers.
- NetBSD is generally more conservative in technical decisions compared to FreeBSD or Linux.
- Several reasons make Rust adoption in NetBSD unlikely:
- - Rust is not available on many architectures NetBSD supports.
- - Maintaining Rust in pkgsrc is challenging and relies on a few developers.
- - NetBSD's source-only, self-contained distribution conflicts with Rust's binary bootstrap requirements.
- - Adding Rust to the base system would introduce significant code and maintenance overhead.
- - Rust's rapid release cycle is incompatible with NetBSD's support for older major releases.