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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

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unwind·

Wow that sounds fantastically optimistic, or pessimistic depending on your point of view I guess.

Rewriting that amount of code in ten years sounds very very hard, at least.

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A significant amount of the lines of code in the kernel are for drivers (7 of 12 million lines?).

A potential strategy would be to set a date where any new drivers must be written in Rust. Deprecate every non-Rust driver on a date after that. Focus on rewriting only the drivers necessary for current hardware platforms (and some sensible/arbitrary cut-off going back x years). Then set a final deadline for a New Linux kernel release that removes all deprecated/C drivers.

I would blindly estimate that entire process to take 10-20 years (not including the time needed for debating the whole thing).

Then somebody "just" needs to rewrite the rest of the code.

So, uh, any volunteers?

They said a C-free build. For that you'd need to "just" rewrite the core kernel, which will be 150-200k lines, and the drivers + arch specific parts for one system. Still a tall order, but a decade isn't unrealistic if Rust proves itself.

Now, rewriting everything, including all the legacy drivers? Yeah, never happening even if Rust succeeds utterly.

Once they get to that point, a new language will be available that makes up for the things Rust is still short on.

Maybe there's a case to be made for a multi-language kernel. Rust is the first step. Maybe it'll make sense at some point to keep Rust, but add another language.

I don't see such a feat taking place in the next decade, you need highly dedicated people. I can see new code being written in Rust but a C free build sounds like something that really won't be happening anytime soon.

I wish something like it could happen, but I am causyiously optimistic.

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