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Comment by loeg

13 hours ago

More recently, in a similar vein:

> Torvalds seemed optimistic that "some clueless young person will decide 'how hard can it be?'" and start their own operating system in Rust or some other language. If they keep at it "for many, many decades", they may get somewhere; "I am looking forward to seeing that". Hohndel clarified that by "clueless", Torvalds was referring to his younger self; "Oh, absolutely, yeah, you have to be all kinds of stupid to say 'I can do this'", he said to more laughter. He could not have done it without the "literally tens of thousands of other people"; the "only reason I ever started was that I didn't know how hard it would be, but that's what makes it fun".

https://lwn.net/Articles/990534/

11 comments

loeg

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ackfoobar  12 hours ago

> Hohndel clarified that by "clueless", Torvalds was referring to his younger self

As the saying goes "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

Occasionally these are starts of great things.

  • nickpsecurity  10 hours ago

    Sometimes, we do such things because it’s hard. We enjoy the challenge. Those that succeed are glad to make it, too.

    • dathinab  4 hours ago

      but most times, even in such cases, people underestimate or not estimate at all the "hard task they do as a challenge" it's kinda part of the whole thing

      1 reply →

m463  7 hours ago

"You are enthusiastic and write kernel device drivers in rust. Write a device driver for an Intel i350 4 Port gigabit ethernet controller"

  • senko  1 hour ago

    You jest, but I believe @tptacek is using an LLM (ChatGPT?) to understand the details of various Linux kernel subsystem and has said it works quite well for the task.

    It's not a great jump from that to "port Linux device driver for XYZ to this new OS in Rust". Won't be perfect but a lot less hassle than doing it from scratch.

  • Y_Y  1 hour ago

    Claude Sonnet 3.5 seemed happy enough to do it, and the start looked promising

         Absolutely! Let's dive into writing a device driver for the Intel i350 4 Port Gigabit Ethernet Controller using Rust. This is an exciting project that combines low-level hardware interaction with the safety and performance benefits of Rust. I'll create a basic structure for our driver, focusing on the key components needed to interact with the device.

    #![no_std]
    #![feature(abi_x86_interrupt)]    
    ...

    but I'm not qualified to judge the quality from eyeballing and I'm certainly not going to go to the trouble of trying to test it.