alt Hacker News> and I strongly recommend a rewrite,
Oh, you strongly recommend rewriting tens of millions of lines of code? Why don't you do it yourself? Just a prompt away, right?
Replies
fwiw at work we've been looking at what the options are more memory-safe kernels out there. Not many options. If there were a "safe linux" maintained by like canonical or redhat or whatever we'd use it. For datacenter workloads like sandboxes and virtualization I think it'd do well.
“Claude rewrite this project, its 40 million LOC, make no mistake”
> Just a prompt away, right?
Humans manually typing out the bytes of source code has been an outdated method, since around a year. It simply doesn't scale as much as those same humans directing agentic teams. So yes, it would be about prompts.
The hard part isn't the technology for the language transition, that one is present today. pgrust shows the way. It's ensuring maintainers are cooperative, i.e. a social problem. Eventually you diverge too much if you do a fork, so it's better done in cooperation with upstream.
Just check how long it took LLVM or GCC to switch off svn for example, and a language switch is much more involved than a VCS switch.
Kernel will eventually move to rust, but not the dramatic and fast way