Comment by lelanthran
10 months ago
> I have a question. Instead of fighting an uphill war in the Linux kernel community, why don't Rush developers just make a new kernel or fork their own?
Because their primary goal is to widen the community and reach of Rust, with "preventing memory error class bugs in the kernel" a secondary objective.
After all, the Rust additions, if properly designed, can be maintained in an out-of-tree fork that tracks the main Linux repo. If they did that, there'd be no one to block their patches but themselves, and yet they don't do that.
Rust is more about community than Linux is. Within the Rust community they make it very clear that it is vital that everyone goes the same way, while the Linux community has had, for decades, people each doing what they or their employer are interested in.
These two communities are not going to mix well, TBH. A community in which every member is a vocal prosyletiser isn't going to mix well with a community which prides itself on "Show Me The Code".
> After all, the Rust additions, if properly designed, can be maintained in an out-of-tree fork that tracks the main Linux repo. If they did that, there'd be no one to block their patches but themselves, and yet they don't do that.
Mainlining whenever possible is highly incentivized by technical and organizational aspects of linux[1], nothing about rust changes that. Obviously R4L introduces complexity and tradeoffs but I don't see why a rust kernel dev whose only goal was preventing bugs would do anything differently in this regard. Linux is a consensus project and opting out of the process of building consensus would mean not actually preventing any bugs.
[1] https://docs.kernel.org/process/1.Intro.html#the-importance-...
So they're ... a religion?
No idea what the particular bit of drama discussed here is about, but that's my impression of the Rust "community".
any community can be called that if you squint hard enough and especially if you ignore the silent, get-the-job-done-and-go-home members of it and only listen to evangelists.
Not all communities have evangelists tho.
And if they need evangelists, it's a safe assumption for me that they don't have other merits.
That sounds like a pretty dishonest interpretation of that effort.