Hi Davide,

My understanding was that the community "mrustc" project was a C++
implementation of early Rust that could compile early Rust compiler
versions which could be used to bootstrap up to the current Rust toolchain.

Obviously the chicken-and-egg problem is a serious one. The Guix
distribution has gotten the farthest, in that they can bootstrap the entire
distribution from a 357-byte binary on X86.

I think the best solution would not be to eschew Rust, but to solve its
problems to the best of our ability, since Rust represents a lot of
advancements in security, re-entrancy, and enforcement of software
correctness; over C/C++.

BSD licensing is not really an issue, IMO, but we must be aware that the
GPL has aged and we are being even more abused since the advent of AI
trained on Open Source. My work on Post Open is meant to address this and
other issues and I have a new version of licenses coming soon, merging
lawyer reviews.

IMO the best solution might be to bootstrap Rust from a highly-verified
build of the compiler targeting Webassembly. This could be made to work in
most places. But let's not kid ourselves: many software programs we now
depend upon are larger than it is possible for any single human to fully
understand. There doesn't seem to be any possibility of solving this
problem in the near future.

We also need to be aware that Linux, based on the now 55-year-old Unix
paradigm, and Multics before that, is also aged, and that newer kernels are
in our future. Redox, a microkernel OS written in Rust, also follows the
Unix paradigm but might be a starting point. A truly modern OS would not
provide any synchronous I/O primitives, and there are other advancements I
could suggest.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Mon, Sep 1, 2025 at 7:07 AM Davide Biondi via Dng <dng@???>
wrote:

>
> Hello Devuan community,
>
> my name is D. I am not a computer scientist, but I have been a long-time
> Linux user with some entry-level coding experience.
> I am writing because I am concerned about the growing adoption of Rust in
> the Linux kernel and in core packages (such as uutils-coreutils).
> From my point of view, Rust brings several risks:
>
> 1-It introduces permissive MIT/Apache licensing into the very core of
> Linux, which could favor closed-source derivatives and weaken the GPL
> reciprocity that made Linux strong.
>
> 2-The Rust toolchain is complex, not fully bootstrappable from 100% free
> sources, and relies on binary distributions. This reduces auditability and
> increases dependency on external actors.
>
> 3-The expansion of Rust in the kernel and in base utilities may bind the
> Linux ecosystem to non-fully-free toolchains and reduce long-term freedom
> for users and developers.
>
> 4-Combined with the ever-growing scope of systemd, this convergence of
> design and licensing risks turning Linux into something more monolithic and
> Windows-like, moving it away from the traditional Unix philosophy.
>
> Devuan has already solved the problem of systemd by providing a
> systemd-free Debian fork.
>
> My question is: what steps, if any, is the Devuan developer community
> considering in order to provide or support a Rust-free kernel option?
>
> Thank you for your time and for the great work you are doing.
> Best regards,
> D.
>
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>


--
Bruce Perens K6BP