this post was submitted on 18 May 2022
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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maybe they are afraid of redox :) I'm looking forward to test a Unix like OS with a Kernel written completely from scratch in Rust
I think, they're simply aware that few young devs learn C these days. The former Lingua Franca is declining in popularity and if they still want to have devs in twenty years, they need to start making a move now. Porting the whole kernel to a different language is going to take a long time...
Hmm, but I hear from many students that they at least had a contact with C. In my opinion the problem with C is, that you have to take care of too many things, e.g memory and pointer management, which can fast turn into really difficult to understand code, especially when you're dealing with many libraries. Having a language which helps in memory management is a very big help and lead's to more stable code
I've had contact with C in a course in university, too, but I never felt anywhere close to as productive as with e.g. Java. Learning C felt more like a historic exhibition than like learning a tool I would actually use.
And yeah, there's this saying/quote, which goes something like "code is low-level when it concerns itself with uninteresting details". And C definitely feels like that to me.
Rust has kind of broken that saying, because it allows low-level machine access, but actually offers rather high-level abstractions.
I mean, you do notice that Rust doesn't use garbage collection, so that is one detail which I largely deem uninteresting as a human that just wants to make things go beep-boop, but yeah, it is still an enormous improvement in the uninteresting details department.
Does it run on any modern hardware?