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Comment by Tuna-Fish

10 months ago

It's just really, really dumb to both a) have rust drivers in the kernel and b) not merge this patch. It's just obviously stupid.

If you start with the assumption of a), there are no valid technical challenges to merging it. It's just better for everyone. Before Hellwig put his foot down as "not merging because rust sucks", he made a series of technical arguments against the patch, which were all transparently bullshit. It was those arguments that really raised such a furor, instead of all the other ways some C devs have disdained rust in the kernel in the past, because they were obviously made in bad faith. And when he was called out for them, he just went full "no rust in kernel".

> Before Hellwig put his foot down as "not merging because rust sucks"

He didn't say this at all. He explicitly and repeatedly said he has no problems with Rust as a language.

And you can't just assert "there are no valid technical reasons". Just because you don't agree with the objections, or even think they're dumb, doesn't mean you can just dismiss them and start ascribing bad faith motives.

  • > He didn't say this at all.

    Okay, sorry. He just said there should be no rust in the kernel.

    You can ascribe bad faith motivations when someone presents technical objections that are already fully answered in the patch that was submitted, and when this is pointed out, they admit that, but don't retract their objections.

    The original objections are specifically not a case of differing values or design ideas. They are nonsensical, the equivalent of 1 = 2.

    • > Okay, sorry. He just said there should be no rust in the kernel.

      That's also not what he said; it's "no Rust in kernel/dma". He pretty much explicitly said it's okay for drivers to do their thing in Rust, but with their own wrappers. You can consider that dumb, but you can't shorten that to "no Rust in the kernel".

      And "I replied to your objections, therefore the matter is settled" is arrogant beyond belief. People can disagree, you know, because they have different priorities, different preferences, different perspectives, etc.

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  • It's pretty clear that the battle over rust is a power struggle. You can't take any of it at face value

    • So what are you saying? That it's okay to just invent quotes and spread misinformation about people, based on what you suspect their true thoughts might be?

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  • He literally called "Rust" a "cancer".

    • I beleive he clarified in the same sentence that he was not calling the language Rust cancer... to quote "where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not Rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade"

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    • He literally did not. He literally explicitly said right there in the (in)famous "cancer" message that it didn't refer to Rust as a language.[1]

      "And I also do not want another maintainer. If you want to make Linux impossible to maintain due to a cross-language codebase do that in your driver so that you have to do it instead of spreading this cancer to core subsystems. (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade)."

      Stop spreading this kind of misinformation.

      And no, I don't think he came off very well here, but please, give it a good faith reading.[2]

      [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977720

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