Linus Torvalds Talks About Rust Adoption and AI

'At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit China conference, Linus Torvalds and his buddy Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Head of the Open Source Program Office, once more chatted about Linux development and related issues,' reports ZDNet:

Torvalds: 'Later this year, we will have the 20th anniversary of the real-time Linux project. This is a project that literally started 20 years ago, and the people involved are finally at that point where they feel like it is done... well, almost done. They're still tweaking the last things, but they hope it will soon be ready to be completely merged in the upstream kernel this year... You'd think that all the basics would have been fixed long ago, but they're not. We're still dealing with basic issues such as memory management....'

Switching to a more modern topic, the introduction of the Rust language into Linux, Torvalds is disappointed that its adoption isn't going faster. 'I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust. They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust.' On top of that, Torvalds commented, 'Another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable....'

The pair then moved on to the hottest of modern tech topics: AI. While Torvalds is skeptical about the current AI hype, he is hopeful that AI tools could eventually aid in code review and bug detection. In the meantime, though, Torvalds is happy about AI's side effects. For example, he said, 'When AI came in, it was wonderful, because Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.