Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#321

Post by purplesyringa »

gkbrk wrote: post #259
cratermoon wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious now. What are the backwards compatibility guarantees for C?

The backwards compatibility guarantee for C is "C99 compilers can compile C99 code". If they can't, that's a compiler bug. Same for other C standards. Since Rust doesn't have a standard, the guarantee is "whatever the current version of the compiler can compile". To check if they broke anything they compile everything on crates.io (called a crater run). But if you check results of crater runs, almost every release so…

Can you provide an example for the broken-crater claim? As far as I'm aware, Rust folks don't break compatibility that easily, and the one time that happened recently (an old version of the `time` crate getting broken by a compiler update), there were a lot of foul words thrown around and the maintainers learned their lesson. Are you sure you aren't talking about crates triggering UB or crates with unreliable tests that were broken anyway?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#323

Post by ThatGuyRaion »

lenova wrote: post #140

This part of the post is being overlooked: Then 2024 happened. Last year was incredibly tumultuous for me due to personal reasons which I won’t go into detail about. Suffice it to say, I ended up traveling for most of the year, all the while having to handle various abusers and stalkers who harassed and attacked me and my family (and continue to do so). This is _not_ ok in any form, what the actual hell?

It's not okay but he's giving them ammunition by mentioning them and complaining about them. It proves that it's working.

When I started getting harassed in 2022 over an ill advised post on a site, the only thing that stopped it was to sandbag everything and rethink how I interacted on the internet.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#324

Post by hitekker »

reshlo wrote: post #299
LinXitoW wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Linus put the Rust developers in an impossible position: On the one hand he approved Rust in the kernel, but then never ever ever has the balls to enforce that decision. Then, the fanatical C developers openly sabotage and work against all the Rust developers efforts. So, the last option for the Rust developers is to take it to social media. Otherwise, the C developers get away with creating a self…

I agree. Everyone here seems to be criticising Marcan for not being professional, but it’s very difficult to remain professional when the people you’re working with gloat in public that they intend to completely sabotage your work product despite it being given explicit support by the CEO. Why are you the only one criticising the coworkers? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread.

Difficulties notwithstanding, Marcan’s drama is excessive. He has a history of it.

His fellow R4L partners chewed him out for jumping in and spoiling their work. They even quietly but publicly disaffiliated R4L from him.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#325

Post by chongli »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #121
chongli wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brigading has no place in open source communities. There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel! The fact remains: Rust doesn’t solve all of C’s problems. It trades them off for a whole lot of new problems, many of which are challenging to addre…

> Brigading has no place in open source communities. Agreed. > There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel! Would you care to share some examples of the Rust for Linux community who have said this? I'm unaware of Hector or anyone else saying an…

I didn't say Rust for Linux community, I said Rust community. Here's an example [1]. You don't have to search online forums and mailing lists very long to find countless others like this.

The problem with the brigading (which has been done by the Rust for Linux community) is that it invites these zealots into the conversation. It's totally inappropriate and not at all constructive towards a compromise.

Plus the stated goal of Rust for Linux is to enable people to write drivers in Rust, not to rewrite the whole kernel in Rust. Yet there are countless people in the wider Rust community that believe Rust is the future and every line of C code still in use should be rewritten in Rust. It's gotten so prominent that "Rewrite it in Rust" has become a meme at this point [2]. There are now many developers in other languages (C and C++ especially) who reject Rust simply because they don't like the community.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...

[2] https://goto.ucsd.edu/~rjhala/hotos-ffi.pdf

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#326

Post by throwaway2037 »

parasense wrote: post #245
nindalf wrote: post #93

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…

> This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful. I am acquainted with Ted via the open source community, we have each other on multiple social media networks, and I think he's a really great person. That said, I also recognize when he gets into flame wars wit…

    > I can think of many times Ted was overly hyperbolic, but he was ultimately correct. Here is the part of the Linux project I don't like sometimes, which was recently described well in this recent thread. Being correct, or at least being subjectively correct by having extremely persuasive arguments, yet being toxic... is still toxic and unacceptable.
I want to say that I am thankful in this world that I am a truly anonymous nobody who writes codes for closed-source mega corp CRUD apps. Being a tech "public figure" (Bryan Cantrill calls it "nerd famous") sounds absolutely awful. Every little thing that you wrote on the Internet in the last 30 years is permanently recorded (!!!), then picked apart by every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Internet rando. My ego could never survive such a beating. And, yet, here we are in 2025, where Ted T'so continues to maintain a small mountain of file system code that makes the Linux world go "brrr".

Hot take: Do you really think you could have done better over a 30 year period? I can only answer for myself: Absolutely fucking not.

I, for one, am deeply thankful for all of Ted's hard work on Linux file systems.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#329

Post by KennyBlanken »

diggan wrote: post #175
nindalf wrote: post #93

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…

> And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false? Many discussions online (and offline) suffer from a huge-group of people who just can't stop themselves from making their knee-jerk reactions public, and then not thinking about it more. I remember the "Filesystem in Rust" video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s ) whe…

> You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.

It's called a strawman fallacy, and like all fallacies, it's used because the user is either intellectually lazy and can't be bothered to come up with a proper argument, or there isn't a proper argument and the person they're using it against is right.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#330

Post by thehias »

stirlo wrote: post #215
thehias wrote: post #204

[flagged]

>M2 upbringing was like 10 hours onstream, M3/M4 would not take any longer. You have NFI what you're talking about. There were major architectural changes in M series chips between Avalanche/Blizzard (M2) and Everest/Sawtooth (M3).

That is not true. Apple claims this for PR purposes, but Marcan and Lina said on stream that the changes are not that big at all - Apple does not completely change their architecture ever. There may be bigger changes on the GPU side, but that does not affect the base upbringing (earlier Asahi versions did not have any GPU support at all, only software rendering) - also that would be work for Alyssa, not for Hector.
Post reply on HN