Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.ed... ) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do. It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining…
Marcan also linked to this resignation of a Rust Maintainer:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240828211117.9422-1-wedsonaf@...
which references this fantastic exchange:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s
I am not a C person, or a kernel level person, I just watch this from the sideline to learn something every now and then (and for the drama). But this exchange is really stunning to me. It seems so blatantly obvious to me that systematically documenting (in code!) and automatically checking semantic information that is required to correctly use an API is a massive win. But I have encountered this type of resistance (by very smart developers building large systems) in my own much smaller and more trivial context. To some degree, the approach seems to be: "If I never write down what I mean precisely, I won't have to explain why I changed things." A more charitable reading of the resistance is: Adding a new place where the semantics are written down (code, documentation and now type system) gives one more way in which they can be out of sync or subtly inconsistent or overly restrictive.
But yeah, my intuitive reaction to the snippet above is just incredulity at the extreme resistance to precisely encoding your assumptions.