OS Development - One Year with Rust - by Bernhard Kauer - Rust Linz, November 2022

Rust Testing

Join Bernhard Kauer as he shares his experience with Rust in OS development, from initial challenges to improvements in code maintainability, efficiency, and complexity reduction, highlighting the benefits of using Rust's features and community resources.

Key takeaways

One year of experience with Rust in OS development.
Having a team with no prior Rust experience, challenges and initial difficulties.
From the initial C code, Rust cleaned up the code and improved its maintainability.
Traits and closures enable more efficient and cleaner code.
Using Rust concepts like iterators and drop traits reduced the complexity of the code.
Having Rust’s memory safety features helps in avoiding common C mistakes.
A simple language contest was held to decide on using Rust instead of C.
Rust’s capabilities in terms of using inline assembly and macros was beneficial.
Debugging with Rust’s profiling library is more efficient than with C.
Cross-compilation and testing were essential for multiple architectures.
Tests can run on multiple architectures simultaneously, allowing for faster testing.
The Rust programming language allowed for faster development and easier maintenance.
Rust’s features and tools helped in reducing the complexity of the code.
The Rust community has many resources and tools available to help with development.
Rust’s error handling and debugging capabilities are more effective.
Rust’s use of traits and generics enables easier extensibility.
Rust’s syntax is closer to C than other languages, making it easier to transition from C.

OS Development - One Year with Rust - by Bernhard Kauer - Rust Linz, November 2022

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