Golang support

[ski7777]

I hope this isn't too off-topic. If yes, feel free to delete it. Do you think it would be possible to do the same in golang? If yes, what would be the minimal requirements to create a simple hello world? I don't understand much of rust programming but as far as I know go and rust seem to have a quite similar architecture so I hope it should be possible to write a kernel module in golang.

Regards Raphael

[alex]

This is well beyond the scope for this project.

From my perspective, Go is likely to be more complex than Rust for kernel interop, since it has a much more significant runtime (including garbage collector). I have no idea if there's any prior art here.

[geofft]

Right, the Go runtime also manages goroutines, which are lightweight threads that generally assume something will handle OS-level threading for-it. In the kernel nothing will handle threading for you. :)

Go also doesn't have as direct interoperability with C - cgo calls are high-overhead as Go adapts how it uses the stack and other things to the way that C expects. Rust's use of the stack etc. (its calling convention) is pretty close to the native C calling convention - the difference is mostly in passing Rust types that don't exist in C - so you can easily have C code that calls into Rust that calls into C, and we rely on that. It's going to be difficult to write a Go kernel module that takes advantage of existing kernel functionality and also provides the levels of performance people expect out of a compiled language.

So, if you try, you could probably get some Go code running in the kernel, but it wouldn't have the full power of normal Go and it wouldn't be something you'd want to use for real-world use cases, probably.