Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speaker doesn't understand the audience question and doesn't respond to it. The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's ma…
> I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc. I had the same impression. Why all this drama is 90% of the time around Rust people?
Also, for many of them, Rust is the first systems language they've ever touched. And that fact alone excites them. Because now they can "dream big" too.
But they have bought into the whole C/C++ are by default insecure and therefore garbage. In their mind, no mortal could ever write so much as a single safe function in those languages. So their points of view are always going to be based on that premise.
What they fail to recognize is that an operating system kernel, by virtue of the tasks it has to perform- things like mapping and unmapping memory, reading/writing hardware registers, interacting with peripherals, initiating dma transfers, context switching, etc.- have effects on the underlying hardware and the runtime environment; effects that neither the type system nor the temporal memory safety of Rust can model, because it happens at a level lower than the language itself. Rust's safety guarantees are helpful, but they are not infallible at that level. The kernel literally changes the machine out from under you.
They further fail to appreciate the significant impedance mismatch between C and Rust. When one language has concepts that are in fact constraints that another language simply does not have, there is going to be friction around the edges. Friction means more work. For everyone. From planning to coding to testing to rollout.
So you have well-intentioned, excited, but still self-righteous developers operating from what they perceive to be a position of superiority, who silently look down upon the C developers, and behave in a manner that (to outsiders at least) demonstrates that they really do believe they're better, even if they don't come right out and say it.
Just read the comments in any thread involving Rust. It is inconceivable to them that anybody would be so stupid or naive as to question the utility of the Rust language. To them, the language is unassailable.
The petty drama and social media brigading on top of it, along with the propensity to quit when the going gets tough, it's pretty easy to see why some people feel the way they do about the whole thing.
A programming language is not a religion. It is not a way of life. It is a tool. It's not like it's a text editor or something.