<p>At the virtual&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/blog/2020/">2020 Linux Plumbers Conference,</a>&nbsp;where the top Linux kernel developers hash out Linux&#39;s future, they talked about introducing&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/7/contributions/804/attachments/641/1168/barriers-to-in-tree-rust.pdf">Rust as the kernel&#39;s second language</a>.&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.rust-lang.org/">Rust</a>&nbsp;is a high-level system language that is&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://research.mozilla.org/rust/">sponsored by Mozilla</a>, Firefox&#39;s parent organization. Believe it or not, this notion is receiving widespread support. Torvalds himself is sure Linux won&#39;t end up being written in Rust. But then, that&#39;s not the goal. No one&#39;s going to rewrite the kernel&#39;s 25 million lines of C in Rust.</p><p>Led by Josh Triplett, Rust language lead, and Nick Desaulniers, a Google engineer, they proposed using the system-level Rust language inside the kernel. Why? Because, it&#39;s much safer than C, especially when it comes to handling memory.</p><p>As Ryan Levick, a Microsoft principal cloud developer advocate, explained, &quot;<a target="_blank" href="https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/why-rust-for-safe-systems-programming/">Rust is completely memory safe</a>.&quot; Since roughly two-thirds of security issues can be traced back to handling memory badly, this is a major improvement. In addition, &quot;Rust prevents those issues usually without adding any runtime overhead,&quot; he said.</p>