Someone is having fun with a side experiment that has no practical real-world implications. If you're not interested in Rust you can ignore it. This stuff is supposed to be fun and we should celebrate when other people are doing fun, pointless things like this.
Tangential note: there is already a community effort[1] to rewrite GNU commandline tools into Rust and Canonical shipped the rust version of the /bin/utils in Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon by default[2] in their "oxidizing" initiative.[3]
PS: Linus Torvalds has confirmed that the existing Linux kernel will never be fully rewritten in Rust.[4] Let's see how well that statement age.
[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
[2]: https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-l...
[3]: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox...
The reasons to not have a full-Rust Linux kernel are over more important, real engineering things. (Platform support being the big one.)
Wonder who could have done that?
That movie is so old it's entirely possible that it's just named "fetch" because that's a reasonable thing to call this feature and so it's a coincidence, but I do like to think that at least some people at WHATWG were quoting Mean Girls...
The readme hints at the prompt:
> It keeps the original system's semantics — what it does — while rethinking how it's expressed: stronger types, clearer module boundaries, idiomatic abstractions everywhere.
"idiomatic abstractions" would certainly bloat the line count.
* https://github.com/yuan-xy/Linux-0.11/blob/master/kernel/for...
* https://github.com/Poseidon-fan/linux-0.11-rs/blob/420152fdf...
The Rust is slightly shorter, though it also isn't organized in exactly the same way. The code isn't that different overall, creating and copying some data structures around, as you'd expect for a fork implementation of this vintage.
Maybe I got lucky, but I would expect that it's more of what other people said: this repository includes far more than the kernel.
It's about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel.
The majority of Rust the code in the repo is not for the Linux kernel.
Only in extra syntax constructs.
But Rust can absolutely do the same thing as C in fewer lines, especially when comparing each's standard features like string support.
Rust may be verbose, but at least you can read it without turning into a cynical greybeard subject matter expert first.
And the terseness is good when you’re familiar with the code.