For those not fond of the increasing use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel or FreeBSD’s considerations for Rust in its kernel, you can perhaps find refuge within NetBSD. One of the NetBSD developers has explained why you likely won’t be finding Rust code within the NetBSD kernel anytime soon.
NetBSD developer Benny Siegert who also works for Google wrote a blog post this week explaining why there likely won’t be Rust code within its kernel anytime soon. That’s even with NetBSD’s kernel supporting Lua scripts as a unique trait.
Diminishing the prospects of Rust code within the NetBSD kernel is that there are many CPU architectures supported where Rust isn’t even available. That would be the lead and immediate blocker to Rust programming language use by NetBSD that supports a diverse array of architectures in a meaningful manner.
Maintaining Rust support has also been challenging with their package management. Also sharply pushing out any idea of using Rust in the NetBSD kernel is that NetBSD’s release cycles not aligning with Rust. NetBSD supports the last two major releases and that means NetBSD 9.0 from 2020 and Rust 1.41 of that the isn’t too practical: “If Rust 1.41 had been part of NetBSD 9, it would be useless for anything except compiling NetBSD itself – Rust 1.41 is so old that basically no modern code would compile with it. Not great.”
All the details on why you likely won’t find Rust in the NetBSD kernel soon can be found on Benny Siegert’s blog.
