Comment by uecker
10 months ago
I think confronting those volunteers that maintain open-source software with arguments such as "you just do not want to learn new things" , "are scared of change", etc. is very unfair. IMHO new ideas should prove themselves and not pushed through because google wants it or certain enthusiastic groups believe this is the future. If Rust is so much better, people should just build cool stuff and then it will be successful anyway.
Overall, this whole situation seems entirely weird to me. All this stuff such as Unix, Linux, and C ecosystem was build by C programmers and maintained for decades mostly voluntarily, while most of the industry pushed into other directions (with a gigantic influx of money). It is completely amazing that Linux become so successful against all the odds. Certainly it also then had a lot industry support, but I used it already before most of this and witnessed all the development. But somehow, C programmers are now suddenly portrayed as the evil gatekeepers, not stepping aside fast enough, because some want to see change. In the past, the people wanting to see something new in the open-source community would need to convince the community by building better things, not by pushing aggressively into existing projects.
I believe the Rust for Linux project was started by a Linux guy, rather than a Rust guy, and many of the Rust for Linux maintainers have come at this from a perspective of "we are Linux maintainers who want to use Rust" rather than "we are Rust users who want our code to be in Linux".
I think it's important to be wary of simplistic narratives (such as "C vs Rust"). Maintaining a complex piece of software comes with tradeoffs and compromises, and the fewer languages you have to worry about the better. On the other hand, the Asahi Linux team have been quite explicit that without Rust, they wouldn't have achieved a fraction of what they have. So clearly there is a lot of value in RfL for Linux as a whole, if implemented well. And that value is reflected in the decision from Linus that RfL should be supported, at least for now.
> many of the Rust for Linux maintainers have come at this from a perspective of "we are Linux maintainers who want to use Rust" rather than "we are Rust users who want our code to be in Linux".
This might be true, but do you have any actual quantifiable evidence for it? Because FWIW, from what I as an outsider see (mainly in threads like this), all the drama looks very much like "we are Rust users who want our code to be in Linux".
It is entirely unclear to me where the value actually is. It seems google is funding it for some reason. And some people clearly have a lot of opinions that this is "the future". People had similarly strong opinions about various other things in the past.
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This isn't the first time a new language is proposed for the kernel though.
At some point there was some brief discussion for C++ in the kernel and that was essentially immediately killed by Linus. And he was essentially right.
Yeah I certainly don’t want to mischaracterize anyone here and I attempted to communicate how this is really a knee-jerk, human reaction to something new making inroads into a space people have extensive expertise in. New ideas additionally shouldn’t be derided based upon the poor behavior of some in the community.