Volish engineer Wedson Almeida Filho who has been leading the Rust for Linux initiative, announced his exit in a message to the Linux kernel development mailing list saying he had a gutsful of “non-technical” stuff associated with the project.

"I am retiring from the project… After almost four years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them."

Filho said he expected to be “past tantrums from respected members of the Linux kernel community."

He extended his gratitude to the Rust to Linux team and reaffirmed his support for the project, which aims to bring the memory safety benefits of the Rust language to the C-based Linux kernel.

Organisations overseeing large projects written in C and C++ frequently cite memory safety bugs as a major source of serious software vulnerabilities. Consequently, in recent years, major developers like Microsoft and Google, as well as government entities such as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, have been concerted in adopting memory-safe programming languages like Rust.

Discussions about incorporating Rust into Linux began in 2020 and culminated in the release of Linux 6.1 in late 2022.

"I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages, I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalise this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix," Filho said.