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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

> They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig)

It's an antipattern to chase whatever language is being hyped the most at the moment. And it's probably bad from a community POV to deliberately attract developers who are chasing hype.

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Yeah, projects like this really need people who will be into it for the long term, and using something like rust or zig is a big gamble. It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-term contributors who know C well and don't want to change, in exchange for an unknown group with an unknown amount of overlap.

> It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-term contributors who know C well and don't want to change

I don't think that swath is as huge as you think it is in 2025.

We were saying the same stuff during the Golang heydays ~8-9 years ago, and the C experts were already pretty fucking MIA.

The Linux and systemd projects are both suffering from a lack of new blood interested in writing plain old C, and the old guard is aging out. Linux is embracing Rust, which should help. I imagine systemd will do the same thing once a Rust toolchain is required to build the average distro kernel.

> It eliminates a huge swath of potential long-term contributors who know C well and don't want to change,

that pretty much described the current hurd dev community and its dying. I wouldn't advocate a full RIIR for most things but I think its a solid hail Mary to maybe make hurd relevant. The alternative is its going to be dead in a few years when the contributors all age out to spend time with their grandkids.

At this point... if you want to contribute to a UNIX-like microkernel-based OS written in Rust, Redox is right there

I'll believe it when Netcraft confirms it

OTOH, I have zero interest in contributing to a C kernel. Even the experts can't write it without messing up with C's vastly many footguns. I'm not a C expert. What chance to I have to add a new kernel feature that doesn't literally destroy my system? It's too intimidating in the sheer amount of risky "surface area" I have to perfectly manage or else face dire consequences.

Nah. I'd much rather use a newer language that's explicitly designed for writing the same sorts of things that C is but with a teensy portion of the footguns.

I'm not saying C is bad. I am saying that if the Linux kernel devs still write buggy code sometimes — not because of logic errors or other design-level mistakes, but because of some goofy memory issue or accidentally wandering off into the wilderness of UB — then I guarantee I'm going to screw it up.

If it were in Rust or Zig or whatever, I'd feel like I had at least a fighting chance of making a tweak that didn't immediately format my hard drive and kick my cat.

Yeah and the rest of us don't want a kernel that mutates a heap-like structure for every minor operation. So until there's a language for writing software with a C-like approach to memory and lifetimes you're not going to see C or C software replaced.

So, Rust or Zig are OK, then.

So you've never written a rust program then. Or you don't know how to write C well.

out of curiousity, wheat heap like structure are you talking about? there are data structures as part of the standard library that do that but as far as I know. you can avoid that and stick to data structures within the stack just fine in rust. I don't claim to be an expert so Id appreciate if you could explain further

I think they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heap_(data_structure), but their claims are so odd that it’s hard to tell.

Redox exists; are you contributing to it?

> > They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig)

> It's an antipattern to chase whatever language is being hyped the most at the moment.

Hype? Come on, Rust's 1.0 release was already over a decade ago. At this point it's pretty boring. How many more years will it take before people start taking it seriously and finally accept that those who prefer Rust over C do so because it's a much better language than C and not just because it's hyped?

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