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One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Rust
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It's such a shame that Rust developers feel like they feel unwelcome, especially due to a complete misunderstanding in implementation details.
Even worrying, this is kernel developers saying they prioritise their own convenience over end user safety.
Google has been on a Rust adoption scheme, and it seems to have done wonders on Android: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-languages-in-android-13.html?m=1
But also, there is a bit of a problem to adopt Rust. I think the memory model may prove challenging to some, but I do worry in this case that even if it was super simple, the existing C kernel devs would still reject the code due to it not being C and not willing to adopt a new language.
Perhaps the fact that Google is keen on Rust internally is part of what Ted Tso does not like about it ( he works for Google ).
Many outside the Rust community see the enthusiasm for Rust as overblown. Perhaps they think that pushing back on Rust to create a brake on this momentum is restoring the balance or something.
One thing I have noticed, when devs push back on inferior languages, they are able to cite all kinds of technical reasons for doing so. When they cannot come up with reasons, perhaps that is evidence that the language is pretty good.
Ted’s rant basically says “we have more code so we matter more and that will be true for a long time”. I agree with the assessment that this kind of blatant tribalism is “non-technical nonsense”.
The thing I don't get in these discussions is that there are people who have convinced themselves that a language we came up with in the first 20 years or so of the industry's existence is the pinnacle of programming language development and that all those newer languages are really completely equivalent in terms of outcome once you add up their up- and downsides.
There's a long thread on Mastodon by the main Arm Mac Graphics dev for Asahi Linux. Perhaps one of the fastest developed and most stable graphics drivers ever made, thanks to a couple amazing developers but also very very much thanks to Rust. And one of the kernel devs flippantly calls it an "unmerged toy project" as if it's not kernel devs' fault that useful stuff and even small non-breaking improvements to existing systems are so incredibly hard to get merged. Not to mention that writing the entire m1 graphics driver in Rust ended up actually thoroughly documenting the DRM subsystem's API for the first time as a side effect because everything the Rust code interacts with pretty much gets strictly defined within Rust's type systems and lifetimes.
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