Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel • Hacker News Board

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#651

Post by astrobe_ » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:32 AM UTC

tw1984 wrote: post #637

quelsolaar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The policy of "No C++, because I don't want to deal with C++ people", should be extended to the Rust community. Whatever you think of the merits of the Rust language, the drama, the lecturing and the general superiority complex of the Rust community is quite off putting, at least to C developers.

> at least to C developers. so it is not about technical merits, but just some language religious thing? nice.

Not "religious" (even though I've used the word "zealot" right here) but rather political or social.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#652

Post by jonkoops » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #601

tsimionescu wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other than that, it's not a binary yes/no question; no one is really against some Rust in some parts of the kernel, but which parts? How? Where? That's the big disagreement. Linus has always been fairly hands-off on these types of disagreements. Some Kernel maintainers are absolutely against Rust anywhere in the kernel tree [0]: > The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries…

> > The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this. You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this. If a maintainer of a major subsystem has those objections, it is a good chance to try to convince them otherwise. If something is not clear, ask him to elaborate. But blackmailing with a social media c…

If you looks at the history then you will see that many different solutions have been proposed but Christoph's responses essentially boil down to 'do it somewhere else' and 'no not there', until it is basically 'not at all'. He is not in a position to make this decision, only Linus is. The patch as it stands lives outside of any sub-systems within Christoph's purview, he is simply being obstructionist out of tribalism.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#653

Post by preisschild » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #528

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a valid reason to reject a patch when the decision to include the second language in the kernel has already been made.

A decision to include Rust in the kernel isn't a decision to include any patches from any specific person with no questions asked. It's valid for maintainers to reject a patch even if you disagree with the reason. Repeatedly causing social media storms to "shame" them for doing so, Marcan's own word BTW, isn't. Rust is young and efforts to use it in kernel programming is even more so. It's completely understandable f…

> It's completely understandable for wanting to take things slow and not be too quick to put it in places where there would be no going back.

Have you even seen the original thread? It wasnt about "taking it slow", he was trying to block R4L permanently.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#654

Post by saghm » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:36 AM UTC

bonzini wrote: post #456

mmooss wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's version 4. Here's version 2, which looks like the first patch submission: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/20230204050954...

7000 is not a lot better.

Okay, but how long is reasonable to take to tell someone that their patch is too big to be reviewed?

> We were meticulous in our submissions to avoid wasting maintainers time. We even waited two months without hearing a word before we sent an inquiry as to the status of one of the submissions. We were told, rather curtly, that anything we sent would likely be ignored if we ever inquired about them.

It's reasonable to ask that people make smaller-sized patches to get reviewed, and it's reasonable to have to rule out some things due to not having the bandwidth for it compared to other priorities, but it's pretty ridiculous to expect people to know that those are the reason their code isn't getting reviewed if they're not allowed to inquire once after two months of radio silence.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#655

Post by preisschild » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:36 AM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #508

quelsolaar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The policy of "No C++, because I don't want to deal with C++ people", should be extended to the Rust community. Whatever you think of the merits of the Rust language, the drama, the lecturing and the general superiority complex of the Rust community is quite off putting, at least to C developers.

I also agree that Linux should close the door to Rust as a matter of principle, as it has done to any other language other than C. I don't believe in a mixed language kernel, it is just nonsense, specially with such a different language such as Rust which is closer to C++ in philosophy.

I love Linux and have no preference to either C or Rust, but locking Linux in to a programming language that was designed in the relatively early stages of computing will lead to Linux dying in the long term.

There will be fewer and fewer new C programmers with people instead taking up newer systems programming languages like Rust or Zig.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#656

Post by mook » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:39 AM UTC

roca wrote: post #448

arghwhat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having contributed a few times, I'd rate it as similar (sometimes much easier!) than contributing to Firefox and Chromium. That is to say that it is indeed extremely time-consuming and frustrating, but when compared to projects of the same scale it does not necessarily come out as more time-consuming or more frustrating - this will never be a small team collaborating on a random Github repo. A simple "swap out X work…

It's way more painful to contribute to the kernel than contribute to Firefox, at least, unless things have changed since I was involved with Firefox. Suppose you find a bug in the kernel and come up with a patch. You email the patch to some kernel mailing list and ask for feedback. Typically, you will receive no response whatsoever, because no-one is responsible for responding. You can try emailing random developers…

I haven't touched Gecko in a decade, but your second paragraph sounds like my experience. My best record was something like a single character bug fix taking months (might have been years?). Yes, the review flag was set to the right person.

I still remember the story where some other guys had to meet some Mozilla folks for lunch and nag them for reviews…

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#657

Post by spacechild1 » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:40 AM UTC

apatheticonion wrote: post #473

zinekeller wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it technically does (kernel modules), but the difference between Linux and NT is that Microsoft guarantees (as much as possible) that its ABIs are stable whereas Linux explicitly does not preserve backwards compatibility in the kernel (only the userspace is the stable interface).

EDIT: Reading this: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-... It seems like a huge technical factor holding back a stable ABI is the C compiler itself. Binaries changing between compiler versions and changing with different compiler flags. So while your code can be written such that it appears to respect the interface of an external library, the underlying binary representation might not line up…

> It seems like a huge technical factor holding back a stable ABI is the C compiler itself.

Not really. Every OS has a stable C ABI, otherwise there would be no stable OS API functions and no application plugin APIs. The actual reason seems to be that they simply do not want to commit to a stable ABI/API so they are free to make breaking changes and remove outdated APIs. Fair enough, but don't blame it on the compiler!

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#658

Post by cycomanic » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #462

cycomanic wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that he let's a maintainer say he is going to fight any Rust code getting into any "core" (whatever he considers core) part of the kernel, even if it's just a wrapper to make driver code more maintainable. I would say, that's a strategy decision that should not be up to any subsystem maintainer, that's a decision that should be up to Linus, by not intervening he essentially endorses that getting rust…

> that's a strategy decision that should not be up to any subsystem maintainer So people are not allowed to hold positions and argue for them in public, or take actions that align with that position? > I don't believe that was what the rust guys thought they'd be signing up for It's not like there wasn't any existing precedence with C++, and many of the arguments I've read seem consistent with that history.

The C++ situation was completely different, Linus said from the get go "no way", thus nobody put serious work writing c++ code for the kernel. With Rust Linus essentially said let's see how it goes, but specifically said he would deal with maintainers who would be unwilling to consider code that would be necessary for R4L. Based on this people invested significant work into writing code that is quite widely used, only to now have a maintainer saying he'll oppose any Rust code coming into the kernel, and Linus saying the guys trying to get the code in are the problem.

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#659

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:46 AM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #178

dralley wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it doesn't invalidate the point, but it's hard to blame being so exasperated by the incredible hypocrisy that you ragequit at that point.

I can also see him quitting because he was unhappy with people pointing out the toxicity of some of his posts

Kind of reminds me of Kenneth Reitz somehow

Re: Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel

#660

Post by kennysoona » Sat, Feb 08, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #627

msh wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX would like to disagree with you.

First of all I mentioned most, not all. 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 wante…

> 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.

So Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?