Is it time to rewrite the OS in Rust? @bcantrill is up! @QConSF
The operating system is a complicated program that runs other programs 
Operating systems used to be called “executives”
Go and watch Wargames not Tron
“Being ahead of your time is not commercially fruitful” @bcantrill
“Ultimate waterfall”
The world was ready for a less top down process to build an OS
Unix was not written in C thats a myth, they were written in parallel
Every language before C screamed, C doesn’t need the caps lock key
OBEY
A block comment cursing the ghost of Dennis Ritchie
The 1990s were a terrible time to be alive
“Attracted abstractions like a terrible abstraction flystrip”
Linux brought C back
2010s looking for something beyond C
“Its not a garbage collector its a heap scanner and its scanning your heap very well”
Rust?
“I was seriously Rust curious” @bcantrill
Composing software components that individually are memory safe is extremely difficult. The Rust borrow checker can fix that and is amazing.
Runtime performance for @bcantrill code was better in Rust. If you convey the ownership correctly its fast.
No one cares how easy it was to develop judt how fast and correct it is
Memory allocation failure is a problem for an OS.
Explosion of little operating systems and unikernels in Rust
Vfork and sigchild together is an unspeakable superfund site if semantics
Some are semantic sewers. Despite the appeal is it worth it? I don’t want to rewrite zfs in Rust.
Hybrid approach
“If you were writing systemd now, no question it would be in Rust. Userspace code is hard”
“The glorified DOS that runs under everything. Humanity vs firmware.”
