Linux creator Linus Torvalds has reportedly committed to bringing Rust to the operating system.
An email received by ZDNet (opens in new tab)Torvalds said that the programming language will make it to version 6.1 of the Linux OS “unless something weird happens”.
This is not the first time that Linux has been rumored to adopt Rust, with some saying that it will become version 5.20. This time, Torvalds’ promise seems even higher, but he insists that it will “only have infrastructure (meaning no serious use cases yet)”.
Rust for Linux
Initial concerns about the Rust implementation were raised regarding the need for non-standard extensions, but Torvalds explained that Linux “has been using exceptions to Standard C for decades”, suggesting that the company is already ready to adapt.
Linux 6.0 is the project’s current offering, available for testing from August 2022, but details on the next release are already emerging, including the ability for the OS to tell you if your CPU is faulty.
According to a CircleCI report on the most popular coding languages, Rust rose to the 25th spot in 2021 after dropping out of the top 25 the previous year. Despite this, Rust is favored for its strong performance, and is backed by Google to develop its Android OS (which itself is a hugely popular Linux distro).
in a post Google’s security blog (opens in new tab) In April 2021, Android team member Wedson Almeida Filho said that Rust was poised to “join C as a practical language for kernel implementation”. Filho went on to explain that rust “can help [the team] Reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in privileged code while playing nicely with the original kernel and preserving its performance features.”
