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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386939 A comment there has a link to a video of what seems to be the final straw.
Also linked in the email in the GP. > Lastly, I'll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 -- and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code.
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Kneejerk pushback from old timers C-only kernel devs.
I would assume this type of pushback is one of the main reasons a project like Linux is trustworthy in the first place.
He did a presentation on making a fs in rust, the response from this dev was "we won't be converting to your religion. We are going to continue modifying c code and your dumb rust code will always be a second class citizen."
Literally just hostility for hostility sake. He wasn't proposing to rewrite everything in rust. He wasn't proposing that everyone learns rust. He was just giving a freaking presentation on making a rust fs that integrates with the kernel and was immediately trashed for spreading religion or whatever.
Non-technical nonsense is charitable.
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Kneejerk pushback from old timers C-only kernel devs.
It's inevitable in any organisations when dealing with change. Identifying resistance and coming up with strategies to overcome is a key part of change management. Telling people their reaction is "kneejerk pushback" usually does not help ;) It's probably more difficult to handle in open source than in a company because authority less powerful and it's more difficult to wave both carrots and sticks...
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> It's caused a lot of trouble so far and for what? The "for what" seems pretty obvious, no? It's the same reason you would use Rust over C in any other project. Memory safety and more modern PL features.
In my opinion, in the case of the Linux kernel, Zig (once it reaches 1.0) would be a much better, more natural, and less painful choice than Rust.
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> Well, maybe that's exactly what should happen. Maybe rust should have never been allowed in the kernel in the first place. Can you clarify these two sentences? You say there should be a memory-safe kernel, and then you say Rust should never have been allowed, which is the opposite.
What they're getting at is that it probably would have been better if the Rust people had started their own kernel project, cherry-picked the pieces of Linux they wanted, and then made their own new thing without three decades of obsolete Unix/Linux baggage. This would mean they could spend their time actually writing software and and less time trying to convince a bunch of C programmers that their time is at an end…
These are a Linux kernel people who want to use Rust. Writing a new kernel would be fundamentally different than working on Linux.
Also, they are “writing software,” and have been for a long time now. This isn’t just some random arguing on mailing lists, this is actual patches, with folks like Asahi and Android writing real meaningful drivers on top of it.
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That memory safe kernel doesn't necessarily have to be Linux itself.
Same opinion here, have all this giant proRust energy and put it behind a few Rust kernels, combining the Rust super powers with latest kernels architectures and have at least one Rust kernel that is not UNIX but something super modern.
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That was pretty toxic for a kneejerk reaction.
Wow, the speakers point was so totally missed it was comical. That was just actually insulting and rude to the speaker in my opinion.
The dev "pushing back" was being an asshole probably because of deep insecurity of gasp there being other programming languages than C.
Literally rust is currently being proposed for maybe new drivers and basically nothing else ATM. Nobody is suggesting rewriting code in rust or forcing people to learn rust. It is literally just "Hey, might be nice to write this driver for my mouse in a memory safe language".