Re: [Qemu-block] [Qemu-devel] Block layer complexity: what to do to keep it under control?

[Peter Maydell]

On 1 December 2017 at 17:03, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> 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