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No, Hellwig also Nack'd the patch that added the wrapper to an independent library outside of the core C DMA directory.
Why would he do that? He has no control over an independent library outside of C DMA? I thought he said he's fine with any drivers written in Rust. Just that the maintenance of such including any wrapper cannot fall into C DMA's lap.
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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.
Market failures of the other Unices aren't necessarily related to the technical advantages or disadvantages or symbiosis with C or being implemented in C. However, making C programmers' life easier was crucial. 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…
Had AT&T been able to sell UNIX, and naturally C, at the same price points as VMS, System 360, and many other contemporary OSes, and none of us would be talking about them today, other than history curiosities.
Instead we are left with UNIX haters handbook, and still trying to fix the security issues across the industry caused by C's adoption, the JavaScript and PHP of systems programming languages, both in adoption scale, and code quality.
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> He didn't say this at all. Okay, sorry. He just said there should be no rust in the kernel. You can ascribe bad faith motivations when someone presents technical objections that are already fully answered in the patch that was submitted, and when this is pointed out, they admit that, but don't retract their objections. The original objections are specifically not a case of differing values or design ideas. They are…
> Okay, sorry. He just said there should be no rust in the kernel. That's also not what he said; it's "no Rust in kernel/dma". He pretty much explicitly said it's okay for drivers to do their thing in Rust, but with their own wrappers. You can consider that dumb, but you can't shorten that to "no Rust in the kernel". And "I replied to your objections, therefore the matter is settled" is arrogant beyond belief. People…
The Rust drama is an uncommon failure of leadership for Torvalds. Instead of decisively saying "no, never" or "yes, make it so," he has consistently equivocated on the Rust issue. Given the crisis of confidence among a sizeable (and very vocal) contingent of the Linux community, that decision has backfired horribly. And it's quite out of character for Linus not to have a blazingly clear opinion. (We all know his stan…
Can I ask something controversial? What if Rust never becomes a significant part of the Linux kernel? What if they keep stalling and all the people pushing for it give up? There seems to be this faith on HN that Rust absolutely belongs in the Linux kernel and if not, the project is a failure.
C was better than assembly. C++ was better than C for GUI applications. JAVA has garbage collection and usually won't force you to fix your machine after a bad crash. Python is better than Perl for quick and dirty stuff. PHP lets you build a web service without much pain. C# is a better Java that also gives you better integration with Windows. Go does a good job with small quick running services. Lua is easy to integrate into programs.
I look at existing C codebases. They're usually well worn and work okay.
C++ codebases would probably be better rewritten in Go or C#
Go codebases? Switching to Rust so you can what exactly?
PHP? Keep using it or us Go.
I also feel like Go, C#, and Python are designed to be fairly easy for a noob to come up to speed. Where Rust is the opposite.
It's fine to say no to any other language but C in the Linux Kernel on a global basis.
What's not fine is caprice and depotism.
Either Rust is allowed, or it is not.
Stop wasting time.
And stop C-zealotry, it's as embarrassing as Rust zealotry, if not more so.
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Please enlighten us, oh knowledgeable one.
Because the Rust used in the kernel is unsafe. All these people downvoting me or talking about 2000 year old books choosing to be maliciously ignorant, which is fine, I guess.
First, no, it’s not all unsafe, it’s not even 50% unsafe.
Second, even 50% unsafe is an upgrade from 100% unsafe.
The problem is that the R4L project is raising a lot of questions about how interfaces are handled by some Linux maintainers, and there’s definitely a difference in criteria when it comes to soundness bugs.
I fall on the side that just because nobody has stepped on it on years isn’t a good excuse to keep landmines in the code, but clearly a lot of people in the kernel think differently.
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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.
OSX would like to disagree with you.
Second, while OS X, and NeXTSTEP before it, are technically UNIX, they aren't seen as such by either NeXT, nor Apple.
The focus of the whole userspace experience is on Objective-C frameworks, nowadays also a mix of Swift and C++.
Steve Jobs was famously against UNIX culture, there was even a famous attendance of him at USENIX.
NeXTSTEP was based on UNIX, because Steve Job wanted to win the workstation market against Sun, using UNIX compatibility as EEE, bringing folks into NeXTSTEP and keeping them there with Objective-C development experience, Lotus Improv, Renderman and such.
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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.
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This was never about the languages primarily though. The C programmers here would react the same way towards any other language, be it Zig or Swift, its not Rust specific. They just don't want to partake the additional headache they'll have to deal with to for making the Linux kernel more accessible to languages other than C.
Despite than, Rust devs kept on pushing it after all that was clearly stated, just to make things more and more annoying. Maintaining a software as huge and widely used as the Linux kernel is a huge responsibility that can't be relied on words like "leave it on our shoulders", especially when real time, immediate response is demanded. Development of something like the Linux kernel in Rust will be left unmaintained eventually, unless millions of dollahs are constantly invested into maintaining it because Rust is not as simple as C and the need to avoid accidental copying, memory leaks and almost all memory related issues will add more work because you can't escape "unsafe" when dealing with low level hadrware and C, making the usage of the Rust programming language for Linux kernel development utterly pointless.
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It's pretty clear that the battle over rust is a power struggle. You can't take any of it at face value
So what are you saying? That it's okay to just invent quotes and spread misinformation about people, based on what you suspect their true thoughts might be?
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I feel the exact same. Marcan has done amazing work, and his random blog entries etc have saved me hours of debugging time in the past. But jeez, it is really painful to see him say absolute nonsense like "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas." - he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.
If Linus thinks that the social media angle is wrong, he should defuse situations before they become explosive because even if one of the devs didn't bring up the drama, there are dozens of news companies that would have printed up articles the second they found the discussion anyway. Linus should have stepped in long before a maintainer blew their stack and started throwing out ultimatums. Once that happened, Linus…
You can certainly imagine ways an authority figure could have defused a situation of a maintainer blowing their stack, but your framing kinda absolves the maintainer of any accountability for their actions.
A team member who needs a lot of defusing is doing something wrong, and needs to learn how to defuse themselves.