Rust for Linux team suffers blow as its leader steps down over "nontechnical nonsense"

Wedson Almeida Filho, a Microsoft employee, last week, announced his resignation as maintainer of the Rust for Linux project following disagreements with some in the Linux kernel developer community, including Ted Ts'o, maintainer of the widely used ext4 filesystem.

Almeida blamed the reason for his resignation on "nontechnical nonsense" draining his energy. He said that he's been heading the team for 4 years now but doesn't have the enthusiasm he once had to continue arguing for Rust's place in the kernel, which is predominantly written in C.

Some people prefer Rust because it's memory-safe. Memory-safe code removes issues like buffer overflows and dangling pointers, reducing software bugs and security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Memory safety is the main selling point of Rust and is one of the reasons it's pushed so much by its supporters, this is one of the reasons some people want Linux to be written in Rust, however, this effort is meeting resistance.

In his resignation email, Almeida wrote:

"I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix."

He continued to share a YouTube video where Linux developers have an open argument about Rust in the kernel, it lasts about 4 minutes, you can watch it below from the timestamp.

The Register spoke to Almeida who said that the detractor in the video was Ted Ts'o who maintains the popular ext4 file system which is in wide use by Linux distributions, including Linux Mint.

Ts'o, who uses C, said that when he refactors code that causes breakage, he can just go and fix the C code that he needs to because he understands C. He said that if he refactors code and it breaks the Rust programs, he doesn't want to have to go in and fix those as he doesn't know the language, adding, "Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust."

Almeida said that this was just one example of the pushback he and his team have been facing from some involved in developing Linux. The most high-profile Linux developer to have a disagreement with Almeida over Rust in the Kernel is Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, who wrote in 2022:

"If you cannot get over the fact that the kernel may have other requirements that trump any language standards, we really can't work together.

Those Rust rules may make sense in other environments. But the kernel really does have hard requirements that you continue to limp along even if some fundamental rule has been violated.

Exactly because there's often no separate environment outside the kernel that can deal with it.

End result: a compiler - or language infrastructure - that says "my rules are so ingrained that I cannot do that" is not one that is valid for kernel work."

In a recent interview, Torvalds said he was disappointed with how slowly Rust adoption in the kernel was going. He said that many developers have got no interest in learning Rust and added that he doesn't use it either but can read it:

"I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust. They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some push back on Rust."

It'll be interesting to see how things go for the Rust for Linux project going forward but it is contending with people who have been using C for more than 30 years to build Linux and changing that could prove difficult.