Is it time to rewrite the operating system in Rust? [slides]
I think the question is wrong. People are already writing new operating systems in Rust just because they can. The question is whether we will end up using their efforts or whether we keep on going back to the same monolith kernels we have been using for the last thirty years or so. Whether it is NT, Linux, or any of the BSD kernels, they each have decades of history behind them.<p>These will of course still be around for the foreseeable future (i.e. decades).  At the same time, we are seeing Rust pop up in a lot of places that used to be the exclusive domain of C. People are already re-implementing libraries, popular command line tools, etc. A lot of these implementations have clear merit in the sense that they are faster, safer to use, easier to scale, maintain, etc.<p>IMHO it is just a matter of time before vendors start providing e.g. drivers written in Rust for their hardware. I could see linux evolve to a point where integrating drivers like that is both possible and common. Once that happens, it will be a hybrid kernel effectively. Rust is not the only thing moving that direction; wasm is also going that direction. People are talking about running that in the kernel. And of course Rust runs on top of that as well. So one outcome would be a lot of Rust code running in a wasm sandbox on top of legacy kernels.