The defeat of Rust for Linux command: Their maintainer leaves due to “nontechnical nonsense”

In September 2024, the Rust for Linux project lost a key advocate. Wedson Almeida Filho, the project maintainer, resigned due to "nontechnical nonsense" and conflicts with some Linux kernel developers, including Ted Ts'o, the maintainer of the ext4 filesystem.

According to him, he was tired of nontechnical disputes with his colleagues. Although he used to be the maintainer of the project for the last four years, yet his enthusiasm is exhausted and he no longer has intention to continue working on Rust’s integration into Linux kernel.

Linux Kernel is primarily written in C. Rust for Linux project is the initiative of developers that work on adding Rust to the Linux kernel. The main motivation behind this initiative is the memory security provided by Rust, which has the potential of reducing bugs and vulnerabilities like buffer overflows. However, the efforts on introducing Rust to the Linux kernel are slowed down by numerous challenges, both technical and nontechnical.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, expressed his disappointment in the team of Rust developers, having expected that the development would have gone much faster. According to him, the developers are used to working with C, and are just reluctant to really learn the new language.

Now it’s unclear how the Rust for Linux project is going to proceed, considering the number of developers having over 30 years of experience working with C and not fully understanding the importance of Rust introduction.