Comment by tedivm
10 months ago
The kernel is doing fine today, but I don't think that's sustainable. The average age of the maintainers seems to be rising, and plenty of skilled people completely avoid kernel development explicitly because of the hostility and, frankly, assholish behavior that comes from the folks on these mailing lists.
Eventually a lot of these people are going to age out, retire, or otherwise move on. I do think there will be a crisis moment at some point in the future.
Also it's, y'know, written in C.
I used to know C. It was my first language, and I spent a fair bit of time in it, but that was before compilers started to treat undefined behaviour as an excuse to break reality.
Arguably I'm not smart enough, or disciplined enough, to write C. This may be the case, and therefore I have naturally focused on other languages. Rust, to no-one's surprise, is my current favorite. I've never contributed to the kernel — for more reasons than just the language — but the language would be reason enough on its own.
C programmers are getting rare...
Why are you projecting your own feelings onto others?
There’s plenty of people who write C, there’s plenty of newcomers who start writing C and if they’re willing to, they can find guidance, mentoring, and tooling to improve their skills. If that’s not the path you want to pursue, that’s fine. But C isn’t going anywhere soon and if you go to any university/college, there’s lots of C being taught and lots of people eager to learn.
they don't avoid it cause the hostility , they avoid it case we live in this high level era , where nobody knows where code runs or how it runs.
how forkable is the whole thing? I mean, it is several decades of code but...
It's not.
its totally forkable. in fact its totally possible to write a 99% workalike.
the issue here is whether or not the broader community would ever seriously consider using an alternative, and whether contributors, particular commercial ones writing drivers for products, would ever agree to maintain two versions.
What?! Almost every major server and desktop Linux distribution ships a kernel full of patches, which are absolutely forks. That’s before we start getting into the crazy town of the embedded world. Clearly the software can be forked. The question is whether the community can - and that is yet to be seen.
1 reply →
[flagged]
> At least, it was exactly that environment that gave us the amazing product that has changed the world.
You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.
To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?
It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.
> You need some extraordinary evidence to claim things like that.
No. It's a legitimate possibility. Maybe it wont happen. But maybe it will. There's a reason that military training is meant to be hard though, and not filled with comfort and affordances for personal feelings.
> To stretch things a bit, it's like saying, while male dominated the field of engineering in the 60s (and still do), it was exactly that kind of environment that made it possible for humans to get to the moon. Can you actually prove it? Really?
No human has been back to the moon since that male dominated field sent them there. And when they added women, they couldn't produce a shuttle that could work without huge budget overruns, or reliably. And the only example of a real surge in a return to space, is run by an asshole dictator at Space X.
> It's hard for me to imagine using git will slow down kernel development compared to sending patches in emails.
No, that definitely worked out great. It was created by a gruff guy who was an asshole to everyone, and wrote the basics of Git by himself in a week.