← Back to context

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel

3 months ago

Because someday the programming state of the art must advance beyond 1970, and someday we must stop introducing new memory safety bugs that cause horrific vulnerabilities, and for kernel code we don't have the luxury of recompiling everything with garbage collection turned on as a band-aid for C's incurable defects.

37 comments

TazeTSchnitzel

Reply
bgwalter  3 months ago

The Unix/C people wrote their own kernel in the 1970s instead of invading an existing one.

  • josephg  3 months ago

    If rust didn’t provide value to the Linux kernel, there’s no way it would have made out of the experimental phase.

    Rust isn’t an invading tribe. It’s just a tool.

    • anal_reactor  3 months ago

      > Rust isn’t an invading tribe

      People doing open-source work often feel very tribal about their code and block ideas that are good but threaten their position in the community. Essentially same thing as office politics except it's not about money, it's about personal pride.

      12 replies →

    • bgwalter  3 months ago

      The "provide value" argument can be used for anything. Modern software politics and foundation sponsorship pressure are so complex that this argument may not even be true.

      It may be true in this case, but certainly you have seen corporate bloat being added to "open" source projects before.

      1 reply →

    • _fe  3 months ago

      > If rust didn’t provide value to the Linux kernel, there’s no way it would have made out of the experimental phase.

      That’s “appeal to authority” fallacy.

      3 replies →

  • zaphar  3 months ago

    They wrote their own language (C) too. They invented a new language because the current crop of languages didn't suit their needs. Your argument ignores the parts of history that are inconvenient and highlights the ones that you think support it.

    • pjmlp  3 months ago

      You mean as in "having fun"?

      "Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own."

      -- https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...

      People arguing for UNIX/C, also tend to forget the decade of systems languages that predates them, starting with JOVIAL in 1958.

      They also forget that after coming up with UNIX/C, they went on to create Plan 9, which was supposed to use Alef, abandoned its designed, later acknowledege lack of GC as an key issue, created Inferno and Limbo, finalizing with contributions to Go's original design.

      "Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1][2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3] also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."[4]"

      -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)

      UNIX and C creators moved on, apparently those that whorship them haven't got the history lesson up to date.

      2 replies →

  • MSFT_Edging  3 months ago

    Back when the primary consumers of the kernel were other researchers. Not billions of machines running our society.