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Comment by dralley

10 months ago

>Arguably his reprimand of Martin is a clear signal that he will never show Rust any favor

You're reading way too far into this. Linus has been publicly positive about the R4L project plenty of times.

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dralley

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gary_0  10 months ago

Positive, yes, but can you point to where he says R4L is here to stay and an integral part of the kernel? He needs to commit, or drama like this will continue to boil over. He also seems content to let the C-only old guard give the R4L guys a hard time. If you only enforce the rules on one side of a conflict, it makes it pretty clear which side you agree with.

cycomanic  10 months ago

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 into the kernel requires consensus from all subsystem maintainers. I don't believe that was what the rust guys thought they'd be signing up for.

  • gary_0  10 months ago

    > by not intervening he essentially endorses that getting rust into the kernel requires consensus from all subsystem maintainers

    And let's not be obtuse, some of those subsystem maintainers are staunchly opposed, so "it's up to them" is obviously an indirect way of saying "no rust". I don't blame those maintainers for balking at a whole new very different language, but Torvalds has a choice of telling them either "suck it up, buttercup" or "I hear you; rust is gone". Instead, he's just letting things fester.

    • chikere232  10 months ago

      This seems like black and white thinking. There's a huge spectrum between

      > "suck it up, buttercup" or "I hear you; rust is gone".

      where various levels of compromise happens.

      Maintainers are people and people can change their mind over time. If rust was a huge success in large parts of the kernel and you still had a few holdouts, sure, you could tell them to adapt or go away. In this early stage, it's kinda up to rust people to show that both they and rust can work in this setting

  • tomnipotent  10 months ago

    > 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.

    • cycomanic  10 months ago

      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.

  • account42  10 months ago

    > that's a decision that should be up to Linus, by not intervening he essentially endorses that getting rust into the kernel requires consensus from all subsystem maintainers.

    And that's a perfectly resonable position.

gauge_field  10 months ago

Agree with that. His statements are available on youtube. I was suprised how positive and eager to the change he was.