On 1 December 2017 at 17:03, Paolo Bonzini <pbonz...@redhat.com> wrote: > Same here. Just like fixing the C code provides a good foundation for a > language switch, some more battle-tested code could be converted from > QEMU to Rust, in order to get familiar with it and probe whether the > benefits are real. Maybe the memory API could be a good candidate; it > certainly would benefit from generics.
At the moment I feel like betting the future of the project on Rust would be quite a courageous decision. On the other hand it might be interesting to look at prototyping to see what benefits it might bring. (One candidate I had in mind was the device API -- given that we have had quite a few buffer overruns in device code, converting some of the device models to Rust might cut off that particular security issue.) I agree with you that trying to tackle conversion without at least one developer with reasonably-expert Rust knowledge is likely to be fraught, though -- what you really need is to be able to design APIs which are idiomatic for the language, rather than the kind of thing you'd write in C but transliterated across... thanks -- PMM
