This might be a little radical, but I really wish google stopped acting like they own anything they want because "they could buy you and your family".
It seems to me like this decision is being made purely because Rust is hot right now, and not because it makes so much sense that its the best decision moving forward.
Or maybe it's because people want to build software that is more secure and reliable (something which C does not have a great track record for)? Google are not the main instigator of this initiative, they are adding their support for it.
If the crashes are intentional panics caused because of detection of a memory safety issue, more crashes there are actually good; in a C program they would be silent buffer overflows or memory corruption that don't manifest until later, or may not manifest at all until it becomes a security issue.
> The Prossimo project has announced that it has contracted with Miguel Ojeda to work on Rust in the Linux kernel for the next year. Prossimo is a new name for the memory-safety projects being run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which is the organization behind the Let's Encrypt certificate authority (CA) project. Google provided the funds to enable Ojeda to work full-time on the project starting back in April.
> ...Alex Gaynor and Miguel Ojeda have done some incredible work, both technically and in terms of making the case for Rust in the Linux kernel. Miguel's first kernel mailing list RFC has a lot of great information about what's being proposed.
> In April of 2021, were able to fund Miguel to work on Rust for Linux full time for one year.
As someone who worked on kernel/OS code in C for many years, I'm very happy to see any language that doesn't sacrifice it's fit for embedded systems try to enter this space.
I think it was a shame that go didn't prioritize the lower-level use cases like its ancestors and I think not falling into a NIH syndrome is wise and mature of Google.
People will drop out because of change, and others will join or comeback. Life goes on.
Rust is an absolute no brainer in my eyes after writing it almost exclusively for embedded platforms for the past 8 months..
But sure, it’s not fit for all legacy systems with parts of Linux probably included in that list
It seems to me like this decision is being made purely because Rust is hot right now, and not because it makes so much sense that its the best decision moving forward.