Comment by intelfx
10 months ago
Saying "I do not trust you, so I'm going to stonewall your entire work with which you could have built that trust" is not viable either.
Besides, none of this was said. Hellwig did not say "I do not trust you enough". He said "you are cancer, go away". First is harsh, but at least somewhat reasonable (in the sense that it _can be reasoned with_); second is not reasonable at all. Your interpretation is excessively charitable to an obvious bad-faith actor.
Why do you guys keep saying he said this?? He did not say that, and you (and everybody else) can see it for yourselves:
> 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).
https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250128092334.GA2854...
That's totally, utterly different than your characterization of it.
(So many other people were also falsely claiming that he said it like that, I initially assumed it was true, so I'm a little irritated.)
Echoing @steveklabnik's words, you're just hanging up on the semantics of how a particular insult has been made. This does not refute or diminish the fact of an insult.
If I actively participate in and align myself with a community that is committed to doing the $thing, and you come and say to me that "$thing is cancer", or that "the fact of doing of $thing is cancer", then it's functionally equivalent to insulting this community, and by extension to insulting me. In other words, it's clearly supposed to make _me_ feel bad (for pushing $thing, or participating in the doing of $thing), regardless of the precise wording.
It's still an unprofessional, uncooperative, and _unreasonable_ thing to do.
Sorry; although I'm "on your side" in the sense that I want Rust in Linux and am bummed out that it seems increasingly like it's going to be a multigenerational slog, thanks to entrenched opposition from some of the C old guard, and which might even outlive Linux's window of viability.
But this is Linux kernel development. You just can't be such snowflakes, and so quick to be outraged. My mom died young, of cancer. I don't like cancer. I know that using "cancer" as a metaphor is a very negative way to characterize anything.
But the qualifier he added in the original statement is absolutely enough to make it a fair comment.
He really, really doesn't think using multiple programming languages is a sane approach. Would you really feel better if he said, "I think a multi-language approach is a very bad idea, it will inevitably spread, and it will end up causing systemic problems far away from this initial usage, and make the kernel increasingly frail and unhealthy over time" ?
If so, ... weird?
If not, then I think you are overreacting to the blunt (but technical, if perhaps motivated from some more emotional response) that he really doesn't like this idea at all.
"Cancer" is an appropriate shorthand to refer to a practice that you think causes systemic harm that compounds or grows worse over time. (I'm afraid I myself may have used it to describe PowerPoint presentations as the basis for meetings.)
I think his comment meets the minimal etiquette bar for a serious technical discussion. I mean, it wasn't nice. But the fact that he doesn't agree with you, or like your work, isn't an insult.
> He said "you are cancer, go away".
I find this absurd mischaracterization of what he said a lot more unacceptable than what he actually said. He's bluntly stating his technical opinion (which, again, I don't agree with). But you're not paraphrasing; you're basically lying.
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His reply after that: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250131075751.GA1672...
> You might not like my answer, but I will do everything I can do to stop this.
In the face of Coccinelle for Rust still being unreliable, can you blame him or any maintainer? The codebase is too large to suggest that manual intervention every time something breaks is acceptable, especially when the same automated tool has been in place for C for nearly two decades. And worse yet, much of the code that is generated for Rust is in the form of macros which are quite possibly some of the most unmaintainable and difficult to parse parts of Rust.
You might not like the response for being strongly worded but it is indeed backed by a technical stance and not a political or social one as has been repeatedly suggested. Already overworked maintainers are not willing to sign up for additional maintenance to what has been a solved problem. Objectively, no one should disagree with that stance.
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I know, and I in fact do not like his answer, and think he is wrong in general.
But he didn't say "rust is a cancer", "you are a cancer", "your work is a cancer", or the other permutations of that I've read in this long thread; that's what I was replying to.
His technical assessment doesn't make sense, and apparently isn't even his to make. So that can, and should be, rebutted and refuted. But not by distorting his words, by attacking the substance of it.
(Which I do acknowldge that you have been doing; I've read the entire HN thread, so kudos for that.)
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> Your interpretation is excessively charitable to an obvious bad-faith actor.
And yet you keep defending Hector.