The hypervisor team has come to the conclusion that using the C programming language, which is 45 years old as of writing, is not a good idea for the long term success of the project.
C, without doubt, is ridden with quirks and undefined behaviours. Even the most experienced developers find this collection of powerful footguns difficult to use. We’re glad that the development of programming languages in the last decade has given us an abundance of better choices.
After a heated debate among committers, we’ve settled on picking two of the most popular languages on HackerNews to rewrite the Xen hypervisor project. Our winners are Rust and JavaScript.
Rust, although not old enough to drink, has attracted significant attention in recent years. The hypervisor maintainers have acquainted themselves with the ownership system, borrow checker, lifetimes and cargo build system. We will soon start rewriting the X86 exception handler entry point, which has been a major source of security bugs in the past, and looks like an easy starting point for the conversion to Rust.
JavaScript has been a corner stone of web development since early 2000. With the advancement of React Native and Electron, plus the exemplary success of Atom and Visual Studio Code editors, it now makes sense to start rebuilding the Xen hypervisor toolstack in JavaScript. We’re confident that Node.js would be of great help when it comes to performance. And we believe Node.js and the current libxenlight event model is a match made in heaven.
Due to the improved ergonomics of the two programming languages, we expect developer efficiency to be boosted by factor of 10. We’re also quite optimistic that we can tap into the large talent pool of Rust and JavaScript developers and get significant help from them. We expect the rewrite to be finished and released within the year – by April 2018.
For those who want a more solid, tried and true technology, we are open to the idea of toolstack middleware being written in PHP and frontend JavaScript. But since maintainers are too busy playing with their new shiny toys, those who want PHP middleware will have to step up and help.
Stay put and get ready to embrace the most secure and easy to use Xen hypervisor ever, on April 1st 2018!
Note that this article was an April fools joke and was entirely made up.
Xen Hypervisor to be Rewritten
