Linux

Yup. Most of my career has been working on embedded realtime software, so interpreted languages are right out and really only C and a subset of C++ are available. I’ve now been using Rust in that way for about nine months now and while the syntax is sometimes silly feeling, being able to not worry about some many other issues has made development much better.

I find Rust extremely fun

It is hard to think in and see through the eyes from a Kernel core maintainer, if you don't do this kind of stuff at this level. Instead enforcing style guides, looking for edge cases and unexpected issues because C allows to do anything must be terrifying. Part of this "nonsense" goes away using a language that is designed to handle this better. And you know, learning a new language with features you always wanted to have in C might be exciting too, I don't know. I can imagine Rust being more fun than C in the Kernel for some, so this is not a wild take or anything like that.

I think the most exhausting part of Rust was two fold: a) the language was not designed to be used in the Kernel, they needed to update and discuss after real world usage, and b) the push back from C developers who either didn't understand Rust or think its bad for the Kernel. The childhood illnesses of Rust in Linux is seemingly over.

I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate.

i did devops between 2015 & 2025 and got used to the cadence of waiting between 15 & 180 minutes for testing/production pipelines to finish vetting the work i submitted to them.

i went back to doing IT last year and setup similar pipelines to update the code base my predecessor left behind and my new boss expressed the same consternation about waiting for your changes to iterate.

i'm thankful for it because it gives me 30-ish minute windows to browse and annoy people on lemmy throughout the day. lol

5 minutes sounds like way too much, unless you mean a fresh compile. But then you shouldn't need to wait that long between changes, since incremental compilation should kick in then.

And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you're happy with and that's stable.

I mean, if you have your modules structured in a tree structure and with proper visibility, then it isn't a particularly big leap to put it into a separate crate. You just move the files, maybe fix some visibility modifiers still, and then a bit of boilerplate to add it to the workspace.

It's only really when you're publishing to crates.io, that you don't particularly want to keep changing the names/scopes of the crates, as they'll stick around on there for the foreseeable future.

Five minutes with build cache? Or from cold build?

With cache, then there's almost certainly something wrong with your computer or project.

Also... you aren't building with --release every time are you?

mold and sccache help a lot with the compile times

Attacking the messenger because you don't have any good argument against the message?

This is the Linux kernel project, one of the technically most conservative projects in the FLOSS community.