Live data from Hacker News

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#441
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them. The only development they want is development inside XCode. Anything else is a hard no.

Are there a lot of dev tools that run on linux but not on Macs?

Mostly because of macos’s unix roots. And you need a third party package manager to boot.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, supporting apple devices is going to be a maintenance nightmare as it goes against the wishes of apple. At best, apple involuntarily makes reverse incompatible changes which breaks the drivers and at worst apple specifically sabotages the drivers to keep people in the walled garden. This may be controversial but you also don’t have a right to merge in code to the kernel. If the maintainers don’t want rust cod…

> Agreed, supporting apple devices is going to be a maintenance nightmare as it goes against the wishes of apple. At best, apple involuntarily makes reverse incompatible changes which breaks the drivers and at worst apple specifically sabotages the drivers to keep people in the walled garden. Apple explicitly chose to provide a way to boot third-party operating systems when designing how the M-series SoC boots. Their…

Great, so you boot your custom OS, and you can... I guess display a terminal and maybe talk to the disk? How do you use the hardware without drivers? Did Apple document their hardware interfaces?

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#443

Two HUGE roadblocks were self-inflicted: adopting a hardware platform that doesn't care about external development (Apple silicon) and a programming language that has almost zero support in the Linux kernel (being the first ever to try to achieve multilanguage Linux kernel development). The odds were set against the Asahi Linux project from the beginning.

Totally—on the hardware platform piece, I've owned Macs since the 90s, first installed Linux on one in like 2003ish, tried it on all of my various Macs since at some point, but switched to a desktop Linux machine full time in 2020. I'm generally not one to crap on ambition, but Linux is just so much more enjoyable on hardware that isn't totally closed/undocumented/hostile/unsupported by the manufacturer. With the Macs there was just always something slightly unsupported, regularly broken by updates, or otherwise not quite right, and that was before the architecture switch.

Apple makes great hardware (I have an M1 laptop I use away from home), but if I'm intending to run Linux as my primary OS, I'm buying from a company that is more open to it.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#445
post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Rust 1.0 can compile Rust 1.0. Rust 1.1 can compile Rust 1.1.

C99 isn't a compiler version. It's a standard. Many versions of GCC, Clang and other compilers can compile C99 code. If you update your compiler from gcc 14.1 to gcc 14.2, both versions can still compile standard code.

There is also a very high level of backwards compatibility between versions of ISO C because there is a gigantic amount of code is updated if there is change. So such changes are done only for important reasons or after a very long deprecation period.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#446
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you watch that YouTube link, you'll see the same guy Ted Tso'o accusing the speaker of wanting to convert people to the "religion promulgated by Rust". I think he apologised for this flagrant comment, but this email shows he hasn't changed his behaviour in the slightest.

[flagged]

> The same people community clutching pearls

This is an unfortunate typo because your meaning is completely lost.

If your claim is that individuals are being hypocritical then you may have a point. Especially if you can produce examples.

But if you mean community vs community then you have simply bought in to the religious debate which isn’t interesting.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#447
One aspect of all of this which I haven't seen directly addressed[0] is the question of what might be going on with Torvalds and the Rust Foundation from a longer term, dare I say "political" standpoint. Torvalds seems to usually position himself as a kind of anti-political, code-is-code type, but then, perhaps there's more to him and to this story?

There's an awful lot of money and power associated with operating systems and programming languages (obviously), and the resulting "realpolitik" of situations like these seem to get swallowed up in these discussions.

It makes sense for technical people to think that the technical debate is what essentially matters, but it usually never actually is.

I've found the way Linux has approached Rust in the last couple of years to be a tad confusing. Always cutting a hard line, suddenly Torvalds' opinion is quite wishy washy. Oh, we'll try it, who knows, what's the worst that can happen, type thing? What induced this change, one wonders.

[0] Well-written blog posts on the subject are very welcome, please share if you know one!

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#448

Reading this I cannot help thinking about what Linus Torvalds said more than 20 years ago[1] in an interview. When asked if he feared competition for Linux his answer was that few liked writing device drivers and as long as no one "young and hungry" came along that could write device drivers and liked it he'd be safe. There you have him, Hector Martin, young[2] and hungry and loves writing drivers. No surprise he cla…

But this conflict isn't about competing with Linux, it's about having a vision for what Linux should be that clashes with the core maintainers' vision.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#450
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're mixing 2 things here: language backward-compatibility, vs. standard practices about what semver means for Rust libraries. The former is way stronger than the latter.

> language backward-compatibility, vs. standard practices about what semver means I've read and re-read this several times now and for the life of me I can't understand the hair you're trying to split here. The only reason to do semantic versioning is compatibility...

I assume that they mean that you can use Rust as a language without its standard library. This matters here since the Kernel does not use Rust's standard library as far as I know (only the core module).

I'm not aware of semver breakage in the language.

Another important aspect is that Semver is a social contract, not a mechanical guarantee. The Semver spec dedicates a lot of place to clarify that it's about documented APIs and behaviors, not all visible behavior. Rust has a page where it documents its guarantees for libraries [0].

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/semver.html

Post reply on HN