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There lies the rub, though: the way Rust is being introduced defeats the best (and possibly only) argument for it. If they wanted to move fast and break thing, they can just stick to C. Hell in some of these cases the C code is even the thorough option as it's already been in use for many years, so it's well tested. Rewriting it in a completely new language, marketed entirely on memory safety, only to disable the safety features throughout the codebase is supposed to achieve what, exactly?
As a former haskell dev this reminds me why pure functional languages are uncommon in production. Pure functional languages are amazing 90% of the time but are a disaster 10% of the time. Since the 10% can derail a project people don't want to use them. The solution has been integrating functional features into multiparadigm languages so that devs can write 90% functional style code and then use imperative code where functional code just doesn't work well.
Rust's memory safety is great 90% of the time and becomes a blocker 10% of the time. A combination of using rust's memory features and unsafe operations allows for high flexibility and relatively high memory safety.
I don't know if the split is going to be 90/10 when you're messing around with the kernel. Also, when you're rewriting old code from scratch, the risk of introducing new bugs is pretty high. When you want to replace something that's been in production for years, if not decades, you'll need a better argument than "it's perfectly safe 90% of the time".
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