Comment by lostdog
10 months ago
It is not concern trolling. It is a harsh disagreement.
Some kernel developers really do feel that any Rust in the kernel will eventually mean that Rust gets accepted as a kernel language, and that they will eventually have to support it, and they the only way to prevent this is to stop any Rust development right now.
And yes, there's nothing that the R4L group can offer to be get around that belief. There isn't any compromise on this. Either Rust is tried, then spreads, then is accepted, or it's snuffed out right now.
A big mistake by R4L people is seeing anti-Rust arguments as "unfair" and "nontechnical." But it is a highly technical argument about the health of the project (though sometimes wrapped in abusive language). Rust is very scary, and calling out scared people as being unfair is not effective.
OP said "As long as this is not delivered"
There is nothing to deliver that would satisfy this argument. Pretending like the disagreement is about a failure of the R4L folks to do "enough" when in fact there is nothing they could do is toxic behavior.
If you go back digging in the LKML archives, Christoph's initial response to Rust was more of a "let's prove it can be useful first with some drivers"
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YOVNJuA0ojmeLvKa@infradead.org/
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YOW2auE24e888TBE@infradead.org/
That has now been done. People (particularly Marcan) spent thousands of hours writing complex and highly functional drivers in Rust and proved out the viability, and now the goalposts are being moved.
R4L people are allowed to get upset about people playing lucy-with-the-football like this wasting their f***ing time.
Yeah, that's an interesting point that even Christoph sounded open to it in the past. Thank you!