This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by David Cassel
83-year-old Brian Kernighan co-created Unix - and recently amused an audience with the troubles he'd had trying Rust. "I found it a pain!" Kernighan said at the "Vintage Computer East" festival.
"I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!"
But it wasn't just that. "The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow! And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow..."
"I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt," Kernighan cautioned his audience. (Acknowledging later that "I'm probably unduly cynical.")
"But I'm — I don't think it's gonna replace C right away, anyway."
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by David Cassel
David Cassel | Sciencx (2025-08-31T20:24:30+00:00) What Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan Thinks of Rust. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/31/what-unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-thinks-of-rust/
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