I know that it is a "slippery slope" argument, but in the future, it will become more difficult to contribute without knowing Rust. That's the entire point of introducing it.
I know that it is a "slippery slope" argument, but in the future, it will become more difficult to contribute without knowing Rust. That's the entire point of introducing it.
I guess in a certain sense, yes, the total number of lines of code in C will go down, so the difficulty of finding a place to contribute will go down by that metric. On the other hand, I'd argue that it seems rather unlikely that literally all of the C code will be gone from git at least over the next couple of decades (and that's assuming that there's even a desire to rewrite it entirely, which doesn't seem like it's anywhere close to even being possible to discuss seriously any time soon), so it seems like the amount of difficulty will be so small that it's a bit silly to worry about it. Keep in mind that there's still not anything stopping new code from being written in C just because new code might also be possible to write in Rust. Right now, it's literally impossible to contribute Rust code to git, so if it becomes infinitesimally harder to contribute C code to make contributing Rust code possible, that's still a arguably a much larger increase in the net "contributability" of the git codebase, for lack of a better term.
And also, a lot of people who hate C, or who never learned it well, will be able to contribute to more and more areas of the Linux kernel.