It's a lot like X11 vs. Wayland. The current graphics developers, who trend younger, don't want to maintain the boomer-written C code in the X server. Too risky and time-consuming. So one of the goals of Wayland is to completely abolish X so it can be replaced with something more long-term maintainable. Turns out, current systems-level developers don't want to maintain boomer-written GNU code or any C code at all, really, for similar reasons. C is inherently problematic because even seasoned developers have trouble avoiding its footguns. So an unstated, but important, goal of Rust is to abolish all critical C code and replace it with Rust code. Ubuntu is on board with this.
Except Wayland was developed by the same people who worked for years on X. And they don't dislike X because of C. And they didn't write Wayland in Rust.
> Except Wayland was developed by the same people who worked for years on X.
Yes, and they hated it and "worked hard to kill it" per Jordan Petridis. Note that the maintainers of X in the Wayland era are not really the same people as the original authors of X.
They didn't just maintain it, they did years of work on it. And again, it was not because it was C. Its because it was literally millions of lines of C from 80s and early 90s and with a sub-optimal architecture.
And there is likely a reason the original people didn't continue to work on it.
So you say younger programmer have not the required coding kung fu to cope with c code? I hope you are wrong. The perspective to have rust like things on everydays devices realy frightens me. C is like a Lingua franca for computers. Nearly any hardware near person can READ it. I am one of this Boomers and i am not able to propper READ rust code, because the syntax is so academic. The fact that more and more code is written in rust, lessens the amount of people that can read programs
It's more like no programmer of any age has the required coding kung fu to cope with C code. It is inevitable that they will introduce problematic code. We have decades of examples illustrating this. We lived with it because there was no truly competitive alternative for so long.
I can read and write C code from the times when there weren't any competitive alternatives. I have no problem reading or writing Rust code. In fact it communicates more to me than C code does or can and I can immediately understand more about the code written in Rust than I can about code written in C.
