Hacker News Reader

Comment by sk0g | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was going to be some boring material UI screenshots, but this is so much more interesting! Susceptible to the usual C bugs, albeit with minor impact. I thought they were switching most of the kernel and drivers to Rust, for some reason.

Edit: not a Rust fanboy by any means, hell, I've never even opened a Rust file.

View on HN

> I thought they were switching most of the kernel and drivers to Rust, for some reason.

Note that zircon itself is not allowed to contain any Rust [0]. It's not exactly specified what they mean by the kernel, but it seems that this includes not just the microkernel but also everything that lives in the zircon top level directory, which is enough to boot the system. tokei says there is not a single line of Rust in that entire directory (but about 1 million lines of C/C++).

[0]: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/cb20372465f875ff4...

I wonder what the ratio of C:C++ is. Sounds like they're using C as a restricted C++ anyway, which is interesting.

I know what it means to use C++ as a nicer C, but what does it mean to use C as a restricted C++?

C as a restricted C++ could be probably something like GLib: a deeply object-oriented library (nowadays C++ isn't about OOP at all though).

As of commit cb20372465f875ff4fbf2a04f0951430207f7b7a, according to tokei, in all of fuchsia there are 792k lines of C, 880k lines of C header, 1.711M lines of C++, 10k lines of C++ header, and 2.585M lines of Rust. In the zircon subdir, there are 569k lines of C, 300k lines of C header and 473k lines of C++.

Zircon, the kernel, is written in C++. There’s no programming language requirement for components, e.g. the network component is written in Rust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com