Linus Torvalds weighs in on Rust language in the Linux kernel

Enlarge / No, not that kind of Rust. (credit: Heritage Images via Getty Images)

This week, ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asked Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the possibility of new Linux kernel code being written in Rust-a high performance but memory-safe language sponsored by the Mozilla project.

C versus Rust

As of now, the Linux kernel is written in the C programming language-essentially, the same language used to write kernels for Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s. The great thing about C is that it's not assembly language-it's considerably easier to read and write, and it's generally much closer to directly portable between hardware architectures. However, C still opens you up to nearly the entire range of catastrophic errors possible in assembly.

In particular, as a nonmemory-managed language, C opens the programmer up to memory leaks and buffer overflows. When you're done with a variable you've created, you must explicitly destroy it-otherwise, old orphaned variables accumulate until the system crashes. Similarly, you must allocate memory to store data in-and if your attempt to put too much data into too-small an area of RAM, you'll end up overwriting locations you shouldn't.

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