Comment by mustache_kimono
10 months ago
> 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!
People are free to think whatever they want, and, if they what to rewrite things in Rust or whatever language, that's how many of us learn!
Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust. They aren't free to force others to do the same to their projects. That's what this is all about: a prominent R4L community leader tried to use brigading and shaming to force a Linux kernel maintainer into accepting and maintaining Rust code (along with the entire toolchain to support it). The maintainer refused, Linus got involved, and marcan stormed out of the room.
This isn't a debate about technical merits. It's a debate about maturity and what's appropriate for collaborating with others (and what's not). The Rust community has been going through a lot of growing pains over this issue for a while now.
>Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust. They aren't free to force others to do the same to their projects. That's what this is all about: a prominent R4L community leader tried to use brigading and shaming to force a Linux kernel maintainer into accepting and maintaining Rust code (along with the entire toolchain to support it).
Nobody tried to force Christoph into accepting or maintaining Rust code. This was stated repeatedly.
I don't see how you can possibly have actually read the discussion and come to this conclusion. At this point you're just making false accusations and contributing to the flamewar.
https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2b9b75d1-eb8e-494a-b0...
They're offering to maintain it themselves but that's not good enough for long-term maintainers. It's like when a teenager brings home a puppy and promises to take care of it. The parents know that they will be the ones looking after it eventually.
I wish I knew of a less condescending analogy but I think it gets the point across. The list of former kernel maintainers is extremely long. Anyone who leaves the project, as marcan did, leaves all of their code for someone else to maintain. This is not a problem for drivers which can be left orphaned. For all other code it is a problem!
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> Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust.
Um, or any other they so choose?
> Yes, they're free to rewrite their own projects in Rust. They aren't free to force others to do the same to their projects.
Where is anyone forcing anyone else to do a rewrite in Rust?
If you're forking the Linux kernel then it becomes your own project, de facto, since you're taking over maintenance of the fork. You're free to rewrite it in Rust when you do that!
Where is anyone forcing anyone else to do a rewrite in Rust?
When hellwig likened the R4L project to a cancer, he was implying exactly this. He saw this one patch as a Trojan horse (in the original Greek sense, not in the computer virus sense) to get Rust into the main kernel tree. This brings all of the toolchain and language issues into it. By relegating Rust to drivers only, the kernel maintainers avoid the issue of having to maintain a cross-language codebase and toolchain, whether they like it or not.
Being a maintainer of a project that accepts patches from contributors is like operating an orphanage. Allowing anyone to just drop off their unwanted babies results in an unmaintainable nightmare. You can say that the Rust for Linux team have been acting in good faith but the very public actions of one of their (now former) leaders contradicts this. The stated goal of the project was to allow drivers to be written in Rust. Adding Rust bindings to the kernel oversteps that goal. It's a legitimate concern.
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