Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he’s had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.
From Wedon’s post on the kernel mailing list:
I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.
…
I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.
Lastly, I’ll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 – and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."
As someone who spent a couple months learning rust, this was half true for me. The syntax? Yeah. No problem. The borrow-checker (and Rust’s concept of ownership and lifetimes in general)? Absolutely not. That was entirely new territory for me.
Could you specify some kind of example where things were hard?
I’ll try :) Looks like I still have my code from when I was grinding through The Book, and there’s a couple spots that might be illuminating from a pedagogical standpoint. That being said, I’m sure my thought process, and “what was active code and what was commented out and when,” will probably be hard to follow.
My first confusion was in
deref coercionauto dereferencing (edit: see? it’s still probably not 100% in my head :P), and my confusion pretty much matched this StackOverflow entry:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28519997/what-are-rusts-exact-auto-dereferencing-rules
It took me until Chapter 15 of The Book (on Boxes) to really get a feel for what was happening. My work and comments for Chapter 15:
Another thing that ended up biting me in the ass was Non-Lexical Lifetimes (NLLs). My code from Chapter 8 (on HashMaps):
That’s insightful, thank you. It wasn’t hard to follow, I did have these exact same “adventures” but I guess I forgot about them after I figured out the ways to do things.
Personally these kinds of things are exciting for me, trying to understand the constraints etc, so maybe that’s also why I don’t remember struggling with learning Rust, since it wasn’t painful for me 😅 If someone has to learn by being forced to and not out of their own will, it’s probably a lot harder