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.
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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."
If you create a char pointer to a location where a variable length string is going to be because you don’t know how long it’s going to be until runtime, there’s no way for the compiler to know it will overflow a buffer somewhere unless the programmer hard codes some logic to check for that. Unlike Rust, in C, pointers can just be arbitrarily created and passed around everywhere and used without regard to what created it or what owns it, and if you change this behavior, you break 40 years of C programs. That’s part of what made it such a popular swiss-army language, its flexibility and low level control it gives you allows you to build pretty much anything with it. But in turn it also assumes competency from the programmer. “With great power comes great responsibility” and all that.