From Jason Gunthorpe, maintainer of 5 Linux kernel subsystems:
IMHO the current situation of Rust does not look like success. It is basically unusable except for unmerged toy projects and it is still not obvious when that will change.
Today I learned that my Apple AGX GPU driver, which is the kernel side to the world's first and only OpenGL and Vulkan certified conformant driver for Apple Silicon GPUs, and also the FOSS community's first fully reverse engineered driver to achieve OpenGL 4.6 conformance, and which is used by thousands of Asahi Linux users in production, and that literally has never had an oops bug in production systems not caused by shared C code (unlike basically every other Linux GPU driver), is "an unmerged toy project".
(He works for Nvidia, I guarantee he's heard of it, considering we beat nouveau and NVK to GL 4.6 conformance.)
I guess this is what Linux kernel maintainers think of us Rust developers, that we only write "toy projects"...
@corbet The problem is that as people in the Rust for Linux project we get to write all the abstractions to make things work, and that means interacting with many/all subsystem maintainers and therefore just one or two hostile maintainers can successfully derail the whole effort.
I'm already making a mental list of people to attempt to design around and avoid interacting with, and sometimes it's not even possible.
I believe that the Rust for Linux project is succeeding. Yes, it is slow and painful, but the people pushing this work are doing the right things and making progress.
The city council (the maintainers summit) is meeting on September 17. Rust will be on the agenda, and there should be a couple of Rust for Linux developers there. That would be a good time to have a well-thought-out proposal for process changes that you would like to see.
@PuercoPop what are they saying on /r/rust... do you got link