> "Productivity" is notoriously hard to measure in software.
We can look at history and results. In these terms, C (and perhaps C++ to some extent) is, I believe, the only productive programming language for making the low level parts of non-experimental kernels.
As far as it can be publically measured, Rust so far has proven itself for application programming in a certain niche and not much more. It would be cool if it could prove itself in kernel space too -- we certainly need less system crashes caused by bad kernel-level code. Curiously though, it has been a very long time since I've last bumped into such a thing in Linux. This makes me suspect that Rust is trying to fix a problem here that's already been fixed in another way.
As for ease of coding, C seems like a massively easier language to learn than Rust. But I might be wrong there. Any data about that, I wonder?
We can look at history and results. In these terms, C (and perhaps C++ to some extent) is, I believe, the only productive programming language for making the low level parts of non-experimental kernels.
As far as it can be publically measured, Rust so far has proven itself for application programming in a certain niche and not much more. It would be cool if it could prove itself in kernel space too -- we certainly need less system crashes caused by bad kernel-level code. Curiously though, it has been a very long time since I've last bumped into such a thing in Linux. This makes me suspect that Rust is trying to fix a problem here that's already been fixed in another way.
As for ease of coding, C seems like a massively easier language to learn than Rust. But I might be wrong there. Any data about that, I wonder?