> objective, technical decision making

There have been several carefully planned iterations of the Rust for Linux effort. Every iteration has addressed some feedback from senior kernel developers including Linus Torvalds. The Rust for Linux folks then worked with the Rust project to introduce these features slowly into Rust. An example of such a change is fallible memory allocation. These iteration cycles have been happening for years.

Check out the issues, especially the “wanted features and bugfixes” for each rust component (https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues?page=2&q=is%3...) for more details into all the work that’s happened here.

Throughout I have seen nothing but professionalism, courtesy and hard work from all parties involved here - the kernel devs, the Rust for Linux devs and the Rust project devs.

You do them all a disservice by implying that this decision was taken without “objective, technical decision making”.

> not linking with C code

I would need specific examples of C code being better than the Rust equivalent but people using the Rust equivalent anyway. I can give several counter examples. Such as libgit2, a C library with Rust bindings. It is widely used in the Rust ecosystem, including by the Rust project itself instead of the nascent gitoxide project. This shows pragmatism.

There are other examples of projects being rewritten in Rust but usually that’s ends up with the Rust version being very good. Such as when the maintainer of rsvg rewrote it in Rust. Look at the test suite results (https://github.com/RazrFalcon/resvg).

Or when someone wrote a text search tool (ripgrep) in pure Rust instead of using PCRE bindings. Look at the benchmarks (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/benchsuite...) - it’s faster than any competing tool on nearly all of them. If you’ve used search in VSCode, you were using ripgrep.

Or when someone wrote a pure Rust crypto library rustls when OpenSSL bindings exist. I believe the results of the security audit speak for themselves (https://github.com/rustls/rustls/blob/main/audit/TLS-01-repo...). See the comments on code quality - “Cure53 was unable to uncover any application-breaking security flaws. After spending thirty days on the scope in late May and early June of 2020, the team of auditors considered the general code quality to be exceptional and can attest to a solid impression left consistently by all scope items. Naturally, this is partially thanks to the usage of Rust as the preferred language for the entire implementation of the rustls project”

These examples show that when good developers rewrite something in Rust, we all benefit from the results. If you have an example of a Rust rewrite giving worse results, and being adopted over the C bindings, that would be helpful. I can’t recall any such instance offhand.

> Open source code examples sometimes use an array of external dependencies that are unrelated to a given project and feel arbitrary. This reminds me of the JS ecosystem.

Could you give examples? From what I’ve seen Rust library authors take care to only pull in what’s necessary. I’d be interested to see these libraries that pull in “unrelated” dependencies.

Note, developing in Rust doesn’t suddenly make mediocre code great. I’m sure there’s mediocre code out there, just like there is in every single ecosystem. The question is, can you get stuff done while only sticking to high quality dependencies? I think you can.

> async-await and question mark.

There is a language strangeness budget each language gets to use. Use up too much of the budget and the language feels alien to newcomers.

Rust already introduces new strange things like lifetimes. New syntax like the question mark and post-fix await strain the budget further. I’ll admit, it’s hard for new people. But I also think this syntax pulls it’s weight. This is subjective and reasonable people can disagree.

That said, these syntax decisions are set in stone. I wouldn’t wait in the hope that they might change.