Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS
“I’m still teaching at Princeton,” 83-year-old Brian Kernighan recently told an audience at the InfoAge Science and History Museums in Wall, New Jersey. “I have not yet retired!”
A geek legend for his contributions to Unix at Bell Labs — and for co-authoring, in 1978, the definitive guide for the C programming language — Kernighan was invited to speak at the “Vintage Computer East” festival. And last month the videos were uploaded to YouTube, showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic…
Besides a fun, fond look at the glory days of OS innovation, Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world today — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone.
“I’m going to make this as informal as I can,” Kernighan promised his audience, answering their questions for nearly half an hour.
And besides being informative and insightful, it was clear that Kernighan — and his audience — were having a lot of fun…
Rust Replacing C?
It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, a frequent topic on TNS.
“Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?”
In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic.
“Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter.
‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”
Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20.
Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.”
“And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…”
All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…”
It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical.
“But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.”
What’s a Distro?
Kernighan was also asked one question that really put him on the spot. “What’s your favorite distro?”
As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled knowingly, and then feigned naivete about this new world with more than one distribution of a Unix-like operating system. (“What’s that word?!”)
But then he said honestly that while he uses a Mac, it’s only to open a bunch of terminal windows “to whatever Linux system the computer science department is running at any given moment. And I don’t even know what it is. So, uh — sorry! I can’t be more helpful than that.”
But another question seemed deeply steeped in the lore of forgotten programming languages. “Given your pioneering role with C, are you familiar with the derivative Holy C?”
It’s an exotic variant of C written by the late Terry A. Davis for his homegrown bible-themed operating system TempleOS. HolyC (mixing source code with x86_64 assembly code) can still compile into x86_64 assembly code.
As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled and said “the short answer is no.” But “the slightly more extended answer is: Does this show up on web sites like 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall?” (The long-running site shows how the song’s lyrics would be printed in 1500 different programming languages — but alas, HolyC is not one of them.)
And when another questioner asked Kernighan for his thoughts on the package manager Nix and the NixOS distribution, a pattern became clear. “God, it’s another one I’ve never heard of,” Kernighan said with a laugh.
He clarified later that “I think I’ve heard it, but I don’t know anything about it, so I can’t give you an answer.”)
Yesterday and Today
During his talk Kernighan remembered the overall environment at Bell Labs fondly, calling it cooperative, collegial, and fun… “It was great fun to hang out with these people.”
But he also remembered that after Microsoft Windows came along, the whole world of technology changed, and “a lot of effort, focus, and talented people started to work in the PC world…” Kernighan remembered that “the good ideas and the talented people sort of drifted away, to some extent — or even a lot — from Unix.” And there was “much more of a focus on interaction,” because Microsoft was making consumer products (not meant for “a technical population),
Though he also reminded the audience that the world then saw the development of Linux, which “keeps this legacy of Unix alive.”
So how does he feel about the consumerization of Unix today? That was another question asked, with Mac/iPhone/iPhone users using its descendants without even knowing it — and “deviating so far from the original free, open source philosophy.”
“I think you hit the nail on the head,” Kernighan replied, “when you said that most people don’t know it…”
He noted that iPhones are running a “fairly long-path-of-evolution version of Unix,” while Android phones “are running a different flavor there of Linux underneath all of that…. I think from my side, as just — you know, somebody who was involved loosely in the early days — and has a phone — I find it intriguing.
“And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can’t get at it!”
And his audience laughed and applauded again…
One questioner even pointed out that Kernighan “has effectively been involved in software for the life of software as a commercial thing.” But that also means he’s also lived to see it become commercialized and “productized”.
So “do you have any hot takes on the current state of software as it exists today…?
Kernighan smiled slyly — as his audience laughed again — as the questioner added, “10 words or less, if you can!”
“A lot of it sucks…!” he said, to audience applause. “Unfortunately, it’s all too true.”
And then he added, to his questioner, that “I could elaborate. But maybe offline…”
Kernighan vs. Vibe Coding
During his presentation, Kernighan had said one legacy of Unix was “programs that write programs”.
“A compiler creates assembly language…? That’s a program writing a program… And once you get it right, programs that write programs do a good job. They do it often better than people do.”
But then, hearing his words out loud, he quickly added a caveat. “I will pass over what’s happening with large language models…” As the audience laughed, he continued, “Because my few attempts on that have kind of invalidated what I just said!”
As the talk drew to a close, someone asked for his advice for future generations of programmers. It’s a question he’s been answered before, and his first response was to acknowledge that “the answer to that — the real answer — is ‘I don’t know.'”
But of course, he had more to say. And there was something affirming in this Unix pioneer’s thoughtful answer. “I think probably computers in useful forms, where you could be doing things with them, will be with us for a very, very long time.”
“It may be that most people will not really realize the extent to which what they do is controlled by software that runs on hardware that uses a communication system. But you, if you do this stuff, will know that. And I think that will give you something to do that will be interesting — and probably actually employable, for some time in the future.”
He had one more thing to say. Though it’s become a cliche, Kernighan told his audience that “if this stuff turns you on, do it. Okay…? I think you can do that kind of stuff, and you can have a good time, and you can probably make a living and enjoy what you’re doing…
“I think doing stuff that you find intriguing is the way to go.”
