The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The cons [...]

The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the “experimental” tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust for Linux team.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    3·
    2 days ago

    I like Python for quick and dirty stuff

    There is one more little secret that not everyone knows:

    You do not need lifetime annotations and full borrow checking if you do not care to press out the last drop of performance out of the CPU, or if you just draft experimental code.

    In fact, you can very much program in a style that is similar to python:

    • just pass function arguments as references, or make a copy (if you need to modify them)
    • just return copies of values you want to return.

    This makes your code less efficient, yes. But, it avoids to deal with the borrow checker before you really need it, because the copied values get an own life time. It will still be much faster than Python.

    This approach would not work for heavily concurrent, multi-threaded code. But not everyone needs Rust for that. There are other quality-of-life factors which make Rust interesting to use.

    … and of course it can’t beat Python for ease of use. But it is in a good place between Python and C++. A bit more difficult than Java, yes. But when you need to call into such code from Python, it is far easier than Java.