alt Hacker NewsLinux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU
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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
How to the binary sizes compare? An original Linux 0.11 kernel vs. this oxidized version.
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.
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"
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?
Nice project, with so many emojis at the start of every title of the README.
Wonder who could have done that?
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?