Torvalds Speaks: Rust's Impact on the Linux Kernel

apologize to the simultaneous translators because I have no idea how you would translate this into Japanese um so one of the things we've talked a lot about over the last few kernel releases is the introduction of rust into the kernel and um I think it has been relatively steady and quiet what's your perception well the rust still is at the point where we don't we have the initial infrastructure got merged last year um it's been growing but we don't have any part of the konel that really depends on Rust yet to me rust was one of those things that a made technical sense but to me personally even more important was that we need to not stagnate as as a kernel and as developers and um so I am always excited by trying something new and not getting too comfortable doing the same thing I mean I've been working on on the colonel now for 32 years uh yeah 32 years and that's a long time to work on one single thing but it's still interesting because it's not the same single thing I mean Linux 32 years ago was very different from what Linux is today obviously and and I actually often look for things where where we can do new things and we can do things differently because it's so easy to get stuck in a rut and say this is working just fine right and and rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing but I think during next year we'll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to actively use it so it's one of those those things it's going to take years before it's a big part of the kernel but it's uh it's certainly shaping up to be one of those so you're writing rust code yourself you're reviewing rust code I have been reading rust code a bit just so that I can make some kind of judgment calls on on when something is too horrendous to be included in the colel but I have to admit No I um I mean the colonel we rely on literally thousand of people every single release we have a thousand people involved and they're not the same thousand people quite often we have people in fact for the longest time we've had the statistics be roughly that every release about half the people involved send just one patch and a lot of them never show up again they may have something small they wanted to fix that they cared about and they were not really kernel people they found it for some other reason and they sent their small patch to the colel and they were never interested in doing anything more but then the other half keeps coming back and and when it comes to rust I'm not going to be the one who manages the rust Cod because that's not my expertise as is true of so many other parts of the kernel uh I'm honestly I'm less of a programmer these days than I am I call myself a technical lead because I'm not I'm not a manager I don't manage people I manage code so I call myself a technical lead I'm not I'm not my day-to-day work is not programming it is um merging other people's codes and rust will be one of those things

Channel: Mastery Learning

Views: 549,419

Keywords: rustlang, Rust programming language, Rust tutorial, Rust for beginners, Rust language features, linux, Linus Torvalds, linux kernel, programming

Id: YyRVOGxRKLg

Length: 3min 50sec (230 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023