The Rust for Linux project has been good for Rust, Tyler Mandry, one of the co-leads of Rust's language-design team, said. He gave a talk at Kangrejos 2025 covering upcoming Rust language features and thanking the Rust for Linux developers for helping drive them forward. Afterward, Benno Lossin and Xiangfei Ding went into more detail about their work on the three most important language features for kernel development: field projections, in-place initialization, and arbitrary self types.
Rust 的语言设计团队联合负责人 Tyler Mandry 表示，Rust for Linux 项目对 Rust 本身非常有益。他在 2025 年的 Kangrejos 大会上发表了演讲，介绍了即将推出的 Rust 语言特性，并感谢 Rust for Linux 的开发者们推动这些特性的进展。随后，Benno Lossin 和丁向飞详细介绍了他们在内核编写中最重要的三个语言特性方面的工作：字段投影、就地初始化以及任意 self 类型。
Many people have remarked that the development of new language features in Rust can be quite slow, Mandry said. Partly, that can be attributed to the care the Rust language team takes to avoid enshrining bad designs. But the biggest reason is "alignment in attention". The Rust project is driven by volunteers, which means that if there are not people focusing on pushing a given feature or group of related features forward, they languish. The Rust for Linux project has actually been really helpful for addressing that, Mandry explained, because it is something that a lot of people are excited about, and that focuses effort onto the few specific things that the Linux kernel needs.
Mandry 表示，许多人认为 Rust 新语言特性的开发进展可能相当缓慢。这在一定程度上是因为 Rust 语言团队非常谨慎，避免将糟糕的设计固定下来。但最大原因是“关注的对齐”。Rust 项目由志愿者驱动，这意味着如果没有人专注于推进某个特性或相关特性组，这些特性就会停滞不前。Mandry 解释说，Rust for Linux 项目在这方面十分有帮助，因为这是一个让很多人兴奋的项目，并且把努力集中在 Linux 内核真正需要的少数特性上。
Mandry then went through a whirlwind list of upcoming language features, including types without known size information, reference-counting improvements, user-defined function modifiers of the same kind as const, and more. At the end, he asked which of those were most important to Rust for Linux, and how the assembled kernel developers would prioritize them. Beyond the three features to be discussed later, Lossin said that the project definitely wanted the ability to write functions that can be evaluated at compile time (called const functions in Rust) in trait definitions. Danilo Krummrich asked for specialization, which immediately prompted an "Oh no!" from Lossin, due to the feature's nearly decade-long history of causing problems for Rust's type system. Specialization would allow two overlapping implementations for a single trait to exist, with the compiler picking the more specific one. Matthew Maurer asked for some ability to control what the compiler does on integer overflow.
通过随后，Mandry 敏捷列出了即将推出的语言特性，包括未知大小信息类型、引用计数改进、类似 const 的用户自定义函数修饰符等。最后，他询问这些特性中哪些对 Rust for Linux 最重要，以及在场的内核开发者会如何优先考虑它们。Lossin 表示，除了稍后讨论的三个特性之外，项目确实希望能够在 trait 定义中编写能够在编译时求值的函数（Rust 中称为 const 函数）。Danilo Krummrich 提出了特化（specialization）的需求，这立刻引起了 Lossin 的 “Oh no!” 反应，由于该特性在 Rust 类型环境中几乎有十年的历史问题。特化允许对同一个 trait 存在两个重叠实现，编译器会选择更具体的一个。Matthew Maurer 则希望能够控制编译器在整数溢出时的行为。
Ultimately, Miguel Ojeda told Mandry that the priority should be on stabilizing the unstable language features that Rust for Linux currently uses, followed by language features that would change how the project structures its code, followed by everything else. The next two talks went into much more detail about the current status and future plans for some of those key language features.
最终，Miguel Ojeda 告诉 Mandry，优先级应该是：首先稳定 Rust for Linux 当前使用的不稳定语言特性，其次是那些会改变工程代码结构的语言特性，最后才是其他特性。接下来的两场演讲更详细地介绍了这些关键语言特性的当前状态和未来计划。
Field projections
Field projection refers to the idea of taking a pointer to a structure, and turning it into a pointer to a field of the structure. Rust does already have this for the built-in reference and pointer types, but it can't always be made to work for user-defined smart-pointer types. Since the Rust for Linux developers would like to have custom sm