Well at least someone is already trying to write an OS with Rust.
https://github.com/redox-os/redox
In Towards Linux Kernel Memory Safetyredox-os
redox
Rust2015–2023
redox-os / redox
redox
Mirror of https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox
41Distinct people
47Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
16.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Mirror of https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
Author here. As steveklabnik says, I'm figuring this out as I go along, with much help from the amazing OSDev wiki: http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page Basically, this stuff is a…
ekidd used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
- servo/servo · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year47 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-10-03 12:55:39 UTC to 2023-08-30 04:00:00 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 3 | 9 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 15 | 4 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 4 | 6 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
This repository is the Build System for Redox OS.
Redox is under active development by a vibrant community, you can see the key links below:
The main website for Redox OS.
The Redox Book and Build Instructions.
Redox Chat and Support.
Patreon, Donate and Merch.
Scroll down for a list of key Redox components and their repositories.
Redox is an open-source operating system written in Rust, a language with focus on safety, efficiency and high performance. Redox uses a microkernel architecture, and aims to be reliable, secure, usable, correct, and free. Redox is inspired by previous operating systems, such as seL4, MINIX, Plan 9, Linux and BSD.
Redox is not just a kernel, it's a full-featured operating system, providing components (file system, display server, core utilities, etc.) that together make up a functional and convenient operating system. Redox uses the COSMIC desktop apps, and provides source code compatibility with many Rust, Linux and BSD programs.
More Links
Book
Contribute
Hardware Compatibility
Run Redox in a Virtual Machine or on Real Hardware
Trying Out Redox
Building Redox
Build System Documentation
Developer FAQ
Chat/Discussions/Help
Ecosystem
Some of the key repositories on the Redox GitLab:
Essential Repositories
Maintainer
Kernel
@jackpot51
Base (essential system components and drivers)
@jackpot51
RedoxFS (default filesystem)
@jackpot51
relibc (C POSIX library written in Rust)
@jackpot51
Ion (defauilt shell)
@jackpot51
Termion (terminal library)
@jackpot51
pkgutils (current package manager)
@jackpot51
Orbital (display server and window manager)
@jackpot51
This repo - the root of the Build System
@jackpot51 @hatred_45
Redoxer (tool for easy Redox development on Linux)
@jackpot51
The Redox Book
@jackpot51 @hatred_45
Website
@jackpot51 @hatred_45
What it looks like
See Redox in Action for photos and videos.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
15 sourcesThere's a group of people writing a full, all-new OS from scratch in Rust called Redox[0] and Google is also working on a new mobile OS called Fuchsia[1].
[0]: https://github.com/redox-os/redox
[1]: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror
In Ask HN: What should an ideal, all-new OS look like?Show HN: Redox Rust OS – v0.3.3 release
232 points · Open discussion> That also has little to do with the design constraints of a general purpose operating system.
Does it not? It's the same issue around no-stdlib, stricter sense of allocated memory, etc. If it isn't something that I can extrapolate from you'll have to explain better why. It's been a while since my CS courses on operating systems.
> Rust gets new features daily [1]. C gets new features every decade if we're lucky.
Yes, this is an age thing. I'm sure in it's infancy, C was gaining features and changing rapidly. For example, C changed significantly early on it's syntax from K&R to Ansi. C compilers have to support that.
It's reasonable to say that the language isn't ready for your use, but the features that are being gained are all related to areas around ease of use of the language, making it easier to get started and lower the initial lea
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rning curve. They seem important. By the way, you linked to the RFC repo instead of the language repo: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master. The language does have a lot of features that make it into the nightly branch, but those take a long time to bake until they're promoted to stable.
> Embedded space != kernel hacking, as I've already pointed out.
I thought we were talking about low-level programming, not explicitly Kernel hacking. Yes, Arduino and it's ilk are definitely not full OS'.
For actual Kernel hacking in Rust, there is:
- https://github.com/redox-os/redox
- https://intermezzos.github.io/book/
- https://os.phil-opp.com/
All of those projects seem very interesting. For Linux drivers, there was this exploratory project I saw a while back: https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko (hasn't been touched in a while).
So people are doing it and seem to be enjoying it.
does https://github.com/redox-os/redox address any of these pain points?
i asked: https://github.com/redox-os/redox/issues/987
In Privileged Ports Are Expensive (2016)The problem is systems software is hard and takes awhile.
While HTML/CSS/JavaScript have historic oddities these only go back 15-20 years. x86/IBMPC legacy has 40years of horrible decisions burned into it.
To that end there is a lot of progress in the systems world, but core infrastructure isn't something you just rewrite/replace overnight.
* Redox is a full micro-kernel OS from scratch [1]
* Rustls is a TLSv1.3 compliant server [2]
* Ring is _mostly_ Rust (uses some C for where Rust doesn't work) [3]
* Subtle is consistent time library for building crypto libraries with [4]
* An entire webbrowser (well the JS is still C++) [5]
* A terminal emulator [6]
* A grep replacement [7]
* A non feature complete tar archiver that supports gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd, brotli, and lz4 [8]
The real challenge is Rust has been _released_ for 2 years now. C is
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approaching 50 years old. C/C++ has _a lot_ of momentum, history, and existent libraries.
[1] https://github.com/redox-os/redox
[2] https://github.com/ctz/rustls
[3] https://github.com/briansmith/ring
[4] https://github.com/isislovecruft/subtle
[5] https://github.com/servo/servo
[6] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty
[7] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
[8] https://github.com/valarauca/car
> You can write a system in any language right? Python is a scripting language and lots of people use it everyday to write systems.
Systems here means things like an operating system, a device driver, video games or a web browser, things that need fast execution, direct access to hardware and the ability to manually maintain memory. Stuff that C/C++ are normally used for.
Could you do it in Python? Not really, since Python has garbage collection, a very high-level of abstraction and is extremely slow for these kinds of tasks.
> What problems is it trying to solve?
It's trying to make it possible to write programs that require manual memory management, but that are checked for correctness of that manual memory management automatically, so that you can avoid many bugs that are related to memory and are commonplace in programs written in C/
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C++, like referring to a certain object that is in fact no longer present etc.
> Also how does it compare to Go? It seems to me that both Go and Rust are mainly used by C/C++ folks that want a new shiny language that somehow resemble the syntax or structure or funcionality of the former and at the same time add some modern features
Go is not really used by C/C++ programmers, as it does have a garbage collector, just like Python. Unlike Python however it is way faster and unlike Java, it is compiled to a native executable, thus it is used by many Python/Ruby/Java programmers who want a faster/native language with similar capabilities.
Go is mainly used for writing web applications and command line apps, just like Python.
> Do you feel more productive writing software in it than in let's say JS?
Rust targets a very different market from JS, but it has a very strong type system and catches a lot of errors at compile time, which to me makes it a lot more productive than JS is, just by not having things explode on me at runtime.
As for the syntax, it actually feels very neutral once you spend a couple of days with it and read the book + apart from the 'lifetime annotation there aren't really any other weird symbols for the category of language Rust is.
For example things like https://github.com/redox-os/redox or https://github.com/servo/servo would be very hard to write in both Python & Go, because they require direct access to hardware, fastest possible execution and manual memory management. They could've been written in C/C++, but would then contain many memory management errors, (given its manually done by the programmer and programmers are fallible humans), which could lead to crashes or serious security problems. Rust aims to prevent these drawbacks of C/C++, while still maintaining all of their benefits, i.e. speed, manual memory management etc.
> Kernels will probably not be one of the first areas of Rust adoption
You probably mean popular/used-in-production kernels, but there are OS's being written in Rust, e.g. Redox [1]
[1] https://github.com/redox-os/redox
In Linked Lists Are Still HardRedox, an operating system written in Rust
3 points · Open discussion> the large collection of existing (mostly F/OSS) software not going to be rewritten in eg. Rust or some
It is happening and will keep happening and it is really necessary at some point. Sure, I don't expect large project to be rewritten overnight, but every large project is being redone eventually. Especially when C becomes main source of problems. And you can introduce better languages gradually.
> operating systems, drivers
https://github.com/redox-os/redox
> IP stacks
https://github.com/QuiltOS/QuiltNet
Many of those are often written in userspace, where you are free to use any language.
Several of them will provide sufficient performance.
> databases, Unix userland tools, web servers, mail servers, parts of web browsers and other network clients, language runtimes and libs of higher-level languages, compilers and almost all other inf
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rastructure software we use daily.
For all of those you'll find Rust implementations. Some are work in progress, some are already widely used.
You might be interested in checking out Redox. https://github.com/redox-os/redox
In Ask HN: Recommendation for a non-Linux OS to play around with?Is there any gain to use this over say ZFS with a script like zxfer* taking snapshots on a schedule and shipping the diffs to a second, third etc. box?
* https://github.com/redox-os/redox
In MARS: Replicating Petabytes Over Long Distances [pdf]