made you look
Best way forward if they so insist is to refactor small bits without interfering with the existing code-base.
I’m not sure they’re even doing that, I think the policy is that Rust code can depend on C code, but C can’t depend on Rust. So at the moment nothing can actually be rewritten in Rust, it’s only additions like new drivers.
Do they really not realize this literally covers everything NOAA does?
That’s the whole point, they do.
On a more serious note, having a CTO at Microsoft, of all places, jump in on your side is kind of embarrassing.
That comment was from a few years ago and wasn’t in relation to Linux, and the company he co-founded made some pretty useful things (And revealed the Sony rootkit in 2005) before MS bought them.
NTFS was designed back in the mid 90s, when the plan was to have the single NT kernel with different subsystems on top of it, some of those layers (i.e. POSIX) needed case sensitivity while others (Win32 and OS/2) didn’t.
It only looks odd because the sole remaining subsystem in use (Win32) barely makes use of any of the kernel features, like they’re only just now enabling long file paths.
If you think the comments about Rust are bad, you should check out any article about X11/Wayland or systemd.
c2rust: Am I a joke to you?
I think the biggest issue would be a lack of interfaces to the C side code, they’re slowly being fleshed out and each one enables more functionality for the Rust modules.
e.g. the test Ext2 driver a MS dev wrote last year after enough of the filesystem interfaces got hooked up
But even then, I don’t think the maintainers would accept one that replaces the existing C driver, that’d break non-Rust builds and architectures, and that’s a sure-fire way to get Linus on your case. Best you can hope for is one that complements a C driver, and even then I think you’d need a good reason to have two drivers for the same hardware.