Comment by chongli
10 months ago
Brigading has no place in open source communities. There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel!
The fact remains: Rust doesn’t solve all of C’s problems. It trades them off for a whole lot of new problems, many of which are challenging to address in a kernel development setting (and much less of a problem for userspace software).
This makes the “C is obsolete” position even harder to defend and ignoring the concerns of long-term kernel maintainers is not going to get anywhere! I think these folks ought to learn the lesson of Chesterton’s Fence [1] before continuing on their journey to promote Rust, which does a lot of great things!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
> Brigading has no place in open source communities.
Agreed.
> There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel!
Would you care to share some examples of the Rust for Linux community who have said this? I'm unaware of Hector or anyone else saying anything similar? Or is this just a fear of yours?
I think we should be very clear -- believing the future of systems programming is mostly memory safe isn't the same thing as saying "C programmers should...get out of the way".
I didn't say Rust for Linux community, I said Rust community. Here's an example [1]. You don't have to search online forums and mailing lists very long to find countless others like this.
The problem with the brigading (which has been done by the Rust for Linux community) is that it invites these zealots into the conversation. It's totally inappropriate and not at all constructive towards a compromise.
Plus the stated goal of Rust for Linux is to enable people to write drivers in Rust, not to rewrite the whole kernel in Rust. Yet there are countless people in the wider Rust community that believe Rust is the future and every line of C code still in use should be rewritten in Rust. It's gotten so prominent that "Rewrite it in Rust" has become a meme at this point [2]. There are now many developers in other languages (C and C++ especially) who reject Rust simply because they don't like the community.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...
[2] https://goto.ucsd.edu/~rjhala/hotos-ffi.pdf
The Phoronix forum is not a good example of anything except hate and toxicity, no matter the subject.
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> You don't have to search online forums and mailing lists very long to find countless others like this.
So -- you're bothered by people on the internet, but not specifically the Rust for Linux people or the Rust project people? I guess -- I'm sorry people are saying mean things about a programming language on the internet?
There are also just as many (more!) anti-Rust partisans out there too, who say lots of crazy stuff too. I'm not sure there is much to be done about it.
> Yet there are countless people in the wider Rust community that believe Rust is the future and every line of C code still in use should be rewritten in Rust.
So what? Does your C code still run? I'm struggling to understand what the problem is. People are free to think whatever they want, and, if they what to rewrite things in Rust or Swift or Hylo or Zig or Java, that's how many of them learn!
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>Would you care to share some examples of the Rust for Linux community who have said this? I'm unaware of Hector or anyone else saying anything similar?
In fact, he said that as his very first reply to that thread:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2b9b75d1-eb8e-494a-b05f-59f75c9...
>Everything else is distractions orchestrated by a subset of saboteur maintainers who are trying to demoralize you until you give up, because they know they're going to be on the losing side of history sooner or later. No amount of sabotage from old entrenched maintainers is going to stop the world from moving forward towards memory-safe languages.
> In fact, he said that as his very first reply to that thread:
I think it's clear from the surrounding context that you are likely over-interpreting some of Hector's comments.
What is the losing side of history here? There is simply too much C code in the Linux project to say "stop this ride, I want to get off and only use Rust" right now. This is a fight about some new code. Rust drivers in kernel and perhaps in the future Rust in other places it makes sense. I believe Hector's arguing Rust drivers are inevitable, because they are already here!
What did I say above:
> I think we should be very clear -- believing the future of systems programming is mostly memory safe isn't the same thing as saying "C programmers should...get out of the way".
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The solution will be to rewrite the kernel in Zig!
My impression is the average Zig programmer is more interested in making a better Linux than trying to prove Zig can be used in Linux.
There are _already_ dozens of hobby OS projects and embedded groups doing systems work in Zig. Everyone knows Zig is a systems language. It doesn't have a chip on their shoulder.
Naah, COBOL.