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Comment by zppln | Hacker News Reader

This was a pretty weak article? All it basically says is that it can be done and adds some speculation that it might make things better. But not much testing have been carried out and the comparisons to existing code that have been made show the Rust implementation to perform worse.

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> show the Rust implementation to perform worse

Here in the Linux Plumbers Conference talk regarding the NVMe driver (the same one discussed in the OP), the benchmarks show nearly identical performance to the existing implementation. At the end of the talk the co-author of the NVMe spec (Matthew Wilcox) made a point to stand up and comment with how unexpectedly impressed he is with the performance: "I was not expecting to see these performance numbers, they are amazing." (at this timestamp: https://youtu.be/Xw9pKeJ-4Bw?t=9486 ).

EDIT: here's the timestamp of the benchmarks themselves: https://youtu.be/Xw9pKeJ-4Bw?t=8626

Linux Weekly News focusses heavily on work going on in the Linux kernel, and often looks at features and patch sets which aren't quite ready for mainline yet, but could be an interesting shift in direction for the kernel in future.

The inclusion of Rust in the kernel is one of these ongoing bits of work which isn't ready for mainline yet, but has still generated a lot of interesting discussion in the past on whether Rust is suitable at all, or whether it's suitable in it's default form, or if it is suitable then what is the best way to start introducing it, or, or, etc...

And this is another step along that (long, convuluted) path. The proposed 9P implementation specifically - to me at least.

If you mostly care about the Linux kernel insofar as what features it can offer you right now then, sure, this might not seem that interesting. And that's entirely fair - there are plenty of other technologies out there that I have that level of interest in.

But for the people who take a deep interest in the upcoming work and future direction of Linux, I think it's quite interesting.

I'd agree that the article probably is a bit too niche, or forward-looking, for a generic tech website/magazine, and doesn't have a huge target audience. But for a focussed site like LWN, I think it fits in pretty well, and matches the audience that LWN targets. It's definitely the kind of article that I keep my subscription for.

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