alt Hacker NewsLinux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU
Comments
I used to like rust, but I feel like I’m being Pavlovian-conditioned to recoil at its mention now.
The ultimate boss of Rust rewrites. Very happy that LLM assisted coding unlocks these kind of projects
I hate that 5 years ago I'd see a headline like this and think it was awesome, and now it's just "look at what someone's spent tokens on today"
How to the binary sizes compare? An original Linux 0.11 kernel vs. this oxidized version.
Docs full of emojis, this is another AI slop?!
Tangential note: there is already a community effort[1] to rewrite GNU commandline tools into Rust and Canonical shipped the rust version of the /bin/utils in Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon by default[2] in their "oxidizing" initiative.[3]
PS: Linus Torvalds has confirmed that the existing Linux kernel will never be fully rewritten in Rust.[4] Let's see how well that statement age.
[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
[2]: https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-l...
[3]: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox...
How does the performance compare?
Honestly -- and I know this project is just a toy/fun experiment -- with modern AI, I think this is the correct approach to Rust-ifying projects. Just fork it and do an AI-assisted wholesale conversion, and run in parallel for a while to make sure all the regressions are found. Then you can compare to the original for benefits and drawbacks, and you get a more idiomatic code-base... instead of trying to convince longstanding projects to go into a half-rust Frankenstein model, which is what I usually see.
Nice project, with so many emojis at the start of every title of the README.
Wonder who could have done that?
rust evangelism is some people / youth of today trying to differentiate themselves from their parents, aka heavy metal of programming. its ok, its fun. i cant read their source code but i dont need to, theres a whole world out there of c/c++/python stuff that will get the job done faster and with less hassle.
I just compared this Rust implementation against the original C sources. Some ~50k SLOC (Rust) compared to maybe ~8-12k SLOC of C (depending on if you count headers). Why is the Rust implementation so much more complex and onerous?