491–500 of 1001 posts
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Nothing in Linux is "here to stay", it always has to demonstrate its worth, and what it's worth is depends enirely on the technology and its developers, not Linus.
DEC Alpha support is somehow still in the mainline Linux kernel...
People use and maintain them and they have very little impact outside arch/ nowadays so they're on the happy side of cost/benefit I guess.
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Just curious. Why can't the wrapper be an independent library outside of the DMA infrastructure? It can still be used by all rust drivers. I think Hellwig is against moving the wrapper into the DMA project that he's forced to maintain it.
No, Hellwig also Nack'd the patch that added the wrapper to an independent library outside of the core C DMA directory.
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I'm usually very critical of how Torvolds treats the people around him and the culture he maintains but this is a rare case when I'm not really against Torvalds on this. I've had to remove Hector's postings from my feeds because he just constantly bitches and complains about pretty much everything. He's capable, smart, and is doing more than anybody ever will for Apple hardware. But he desperately needs to Stop Posti…
I've said this before, but the rust community really seems to attract the most toxic and drama-thumping types as their icons. I'm not really sure why such types are drawn to it.
From shaming everything else as either slow or unsafe to rewrite the universe, the Rust community makes it hard for new comers to consider the language by its merit.
But the good thing is, the hype has settled down and Rust has found its niche. It’s not tackling Go or Python anytime soon and competes in a different plane.
Zig is another great alternative for someone like me who never found Rust a pleasant language to work with.
From what I can piece together it seems Hector is upset about someone ("Hellwig"?) doing something that was seen as intentionally sabotaging the rust efforts. Hector posted about it on socials. Linus came down on Hector for leveraging socials to fight kernel disputes. Hector quits. No doubt that is a flawed summary so feel free to correct
I saw the social media post, and it didn’t even register as “trying to start a brigade” IMO. I read it as “look at this shit” and general frustration with the likes of DMA-guys behaviour.
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Perhaps C is here to stay and that is the way Linux should live and naturally die. That's what's being proposed here by the guy who opposes multi-language projects.
Most UNIX systems that were not implemented in C, and thus lacked the symbiotic relationship, never survived in the market, sadly. There have been UNIX systems implemented, Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, Modula-3, as the most relevant ones. All gone. Also note that POSIX/UNIX certification requires a C compiler presence.
Linux was at the correct place at the correct time. It was the only free version of Unix-like OSes that didn't have legal bullshit to deal with. IBM and Intel's support also made GNU/Linux ecosystem successful, without them it would stay as an academic project. Being free meant that it had an advantage where price sensitivity mattered and dotcom boom and VC explosion is very sensitive to cheaping out and preffers suffering with less-than-ideal software. So Linux stayed popular while other ones died slowly.
C had a huge following and all OSes had to support it. Simplicity made it popular when average hardware at the hands of many academics and young professionals was very weak. Being written in C may have made things marginally easier but neglecting it for Ada or Pascal was a terminal mistake. Windows isn't Unix at all but it also had to support C well.
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That's a false equivalency. All of those languages are integrated through strong semantic and concrete abstractions (e.g. file system I/O or GCC interfaces) that evolve, if at all, very slowly. Some, like assembly, are necessary concessions, and are exceptions that prove the rule--developers prefer GCC builtins if available, for example. The problem with Rust in the kernel is that the kernel has historically eschewed…
> Refactoring can be painful in Rust when it involves very low-level changes in semantics I don't know what this is about. In my experience, refactorings that change the semantics of APIs are much easier in Rust than in C. E.g., change assumptions about the lifetimes of pointers passed into APIs: the Rust compiler will tell you where you need to change anything; the C compiler will happily compile your code and you'l…
And there are more subtle issues. From the perspective of C code, Rust looks and behave as if it assumes strict aliasing, a consequence of the borrowing rules--a mutable pointer can never alias. But the Linux kernel uses -fno-strict-alias (i.e. any pointer can alias, regardless of type), so a subtle change in C code which works fine for the kernel could silently break Rust code if the C-side developer wasn't aware of these subtle nuances in memory models and how they were expressed in the unsafe wrappers. This might be a totally contrived scenario[1], or it could be very real given the tower of abstractions built on the Rust side over the C APIs, which might overspecify certain semantics to fit "cleanly" (i.e. best practice) into the Rust model.
Which points at another issue: all of these hypotheticals might be (probably are?) overblown. But over the past 2-3 years, with the exception of a couple of high-profile drivers not yet mainlined (AFAIU), the vast majority of the effort on the Rust side has been building towers of abstraction. In almost any open source project, C or otherwise, a newcomer who starts writing towers of abstractions rather than concrete, usable code would be shooed away. There are reasonable justifications for why Rust has been doing this, yet its also understandable why this might draw suspicions about the practicality and utility of mixing C and Rust in the kernel. But either way it means that after all this time people are still largely arguing over hypotheticals.
[1] Or entirely wrong. Maybe kernel Rust is using flags to ensure aliasing optimizations can't happen. clang (and thus LLVM) supports -fno-strict-alias, but AFAIU alot of Rust code massaging happens on the Rust (MIR or equivalent) side.
There will be a similar drama when Zig reaches 1.0. There will be a bunch of Ziggers trying to get it into the kernal. The Rust fad is already slowing down. Maybe it's a good idea to wait 10-15 years before trying to rewrite the universe in a "memory safe" language and pushing that upstream.
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> an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds Exactly the point. IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results. So in the specific instances (like this one) where he's not decisively, unequivocally, and even harshly saying "yes" or "no" to something, the community sho…
> IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results. I wear garlic every day and have yet to be attacked by a vampire; clearly this is due to the garlic! Tang/ballpoint pens/velcro never would have been invented if it weren't for the Apollo program. etc.
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DEC Alpha support is somehow still in the mainline Linux kernel...
Yeah m68k is still around too and it has more than a decade on alpha. People use and maintain them and they have very little impact outside arch/ nowadays so they're on the happy side of cost/benefit I guess.
I'm not sure if Alphas are even being made anymore, even 15-20 years ago.
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I'm usually very critical of how Torvolds treats the people around him and the culture he maintains but this is a rare case when I'm not really against Torvalds on this. I've had to remove Hector's postings from my feeds because he just constantly bitches and complains about pretty much everything. He's capable, smart, and is doing more than anybody ever will for Apple hardware. But he desperately needs to Stop Posti…
I've said this before, but the rust community really seems to attract the most toxic and drama-thumping types as their icons. I'm not really sure why such types are drawn to it.