Linux creator Linus Torvalds has reportedly committed to porting Rust to the operating system.
In an email received ZDNet (opens in a new tab)Torvalds said that the programming language will move to version 6.1 of the Linux OS “unless something weird happens.”
This isn’t the first time Linux has been rumored to adopt Rust, and some say it will make it before version 5.20. Torvalds’ commitment seems to be bigger this time around, though he emphasizes that he will have “just the basic infrastructure (ie, no major use case yet).”
Rust for Linux
There were reportedly initial concerns about Rust’s implementation of requiring non-standard extensions, but Torvalds explained that Linux “has been using exceptions to the C standard for decades,” indicating that the company is already ready to adapt.
Linux 6.0 this is the current offering of the project, which has been available for testing since August 2022, but details of the next release are already being revealed, including the possibility of OS tell you when your processor is faulty.
According to a report by CircleCI on most popular coding languages, Rust just landed at number 25 in 2021 after dropping out of the top 25 last year. Despite this, Rust is favored for high performance and is supported by Google in the development of its Android OS (which itself is very popular Linux distribution).
In the post on Google Security Blog (opens in a new tab) back in April 2021, Android team member Wedson Almeida Filho stated that Rust was ready to join C “as a practical kernel implementation language”. Filho goes on to explain that Rust “can help [the team] reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in privileged code while playing nice with the main kernel and preserving its performance characteristics.”