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Rust in the Linux kernel: part 2
In 2023, Fujita Tomonori wrote a Rust version of the existing driver for the Asix AX88796B em [...]
The as u16 part at the end is a cast, since the original uapi::BMCR_* constants being referenced are defined in C and assumed to be 32 or 64 bits by default, depending on the platform. References (written with an &) are in many ways Rust's most prominent feature; they are like pointers, but with compile-time guarantees that certain classes of bugs (such as concurrent mutable access without synchronization) can't happen. The C equivalent is a const pointer to the data section of the executable: it is never allocated, freed, or modified, and is therefore fine to dereference anywhere in the program.
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