Comment by arp242
10 months ago
> 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.
No he did say he doesn’t want rust in Linux at all. Now I understand that he didn’t say “I won’t allow rust to be in Linux”, which is a useful distinction to make. But let’s not pretend like he didn’t say “rust shouldn’t be in Linux” at all.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250204052916.GA28741@lst.de/
He literally said this:
> Every additional bit that the another language creeps in drastically reduces the maintainability of the kernel as an integrated project. The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this. You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250131075751.GA16720@lst.de/
> 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".
Have you actually taken a look at the patch?
There was NO RUST CODE ADDED TO kernel/dma, they wanted to add a dma wrapper to a rust/ folder.
> The common ground is that I have absolutely no interest in helping to spread a multi-language code base. I absolutely support using Rust in new codebase, but I do not at all in Linux.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250204052916.GA28741@lst.de/
He said no Rust (or any other language except C) in any core code. Notably the patch was not eve being added to kernel/dma
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> "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.
I'm sorry for not being clearer, but that is specifically not what is going on. The objections were of factual, technical nature. As in, "do not do X". The problem is that the code in question was not doing X, and it was not doing anything that could be construed as doing X. The objections did not arise from differences in priorities, preferences, or perspectives, they were just factually wrong.
please stop spreading such highly misleading nonsense. look at what is black and white. blindly defending such toxic people is not doing linux any good.
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?
You’re the one doing that by pretending that Hellwig is acting contrary to his own statements.
wait a second, I thought you are the one labelling people as "toxic" when completely ignoring the context that really matters.
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"
So, to be more specific, he called Rust in Linux kernel source a cancer.
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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
care to explain why the following patch that touches nothing got rejected?
rust/bindings/bindings_helper.h | 1 +
rust/kernel/dma.rs | 271 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
rust/kernel/lib.rs | 1 +
rejecting such patch is the exact cancer that need to cured. stop misleading people.
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> that it didn't refer to Rust as a language.
No, he didnt refer to Rust as cancer, but to Rust in the Linux kernel / the R4L project.