Programming Language¶
The kernel is written in the C programming language [c-language].
More precisely, the kernel is typically compiled with gcc [gcc]
under -std=gnu11 [gcc-c-dialect-options]: the GNU dialect of ISO C11.
clang [clang] is also supported, see docs on
Building Linux with Clang/LLVM.
This dialect contains many extensions to the language [gnu-extensions], and many of them are used within the kernel as a matter of course.
Attributes¶
One of the common extensions used throughout the kernel are attributes [gcc-attribute-syntax]. Attributes allow to introduce implementation-defined semantics to language entities (like variables, functions or types) without having to make significant syntactic changes to the language (e.g. adding a new keyword) [n2049].
In some cases, attributes are optional (i.e. a compiler not supporting them should still produce proper code, even if it is slower or does not perform as many compile-time checks/diagnostics).
The kernel defines pseudo-keywords (e.g. __pure) instead of using
directly the GNU attribute syntax (e.g. __attribute__((__pure__)))
in order to feature detect which ones can be used and/or to shorten the code.
Please refer to include/linux/compiler_attributes.h for more information.
Rust¶
The kernel has experimental support for the Rust programming language
[rust-language] under CONFIG_RUST. It is compiled with rustc [rustc]
under --edition=2021 [rust-editions]. Editions are a way to introduce
small changes to the language that are not backwards compatible.
On top of that, some unstable features [rust-unstable-features] are used in the kernel. Unstable features may change in the future, thus it is an important goal to reach a point where only stable features are used.
Please refer to Rust for more information.