Rust Just Became the Second Language Approved for the Linux Kernel's Core
After years of debate, memory-safe Rust is moving from the periphery to the heart of the world's most important codebase.
Diego Santos
Cloud & DevOps
A milestone for memory safety
The Linux kernel has been written in C for over three decades. That's not changing overnight — but a decision this week marks the clearest signal yet that Rust is here to stay.
Maintainers approved Rust for additional core subsystems, citing the language's guarantees against entire categories of memory bugs that have plagued C code for years.
The human side
The transition hasn't been without friction. Longtime contributors have voiced concerns about complexity and tooling. But the security argument has proven hard to counter: a large share of critical kernel vulnerabilities stem from memory-safety errors that Rust prevents by design.
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