Following arguments on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few days over some Linux kernel maintainers being against the notion of Rust code in the mainline Linux kernel and trying to avoid it and very passionate views over the Linux kernel development process, Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin has removed himself from being an upstream maintainer of the ARM Apple code.
It’s really a bummer seeing how much childish drama is in the Linux dev community.
I am not nearly a good enough dev to contribute to the Linux kernel, but I am working my way towards that point currently at night after my kids are in bed. Be the change and what not.
That’s a good way to take a bad situation and make it better. Good luck! Maybe I’ll join you one day.
The anti Rust bullshit is gonna kill Linux’s growth.
it seemed like the innocent(ish) holy wars of the past like emacs vs vi; but it’s taken on a whole new destructive trajectory of its own and the old guard would rather see Linux ossify into irrelevancy rather than letting the next generation take over.
it reminds me of an old quote from a general to the effect of: if 5 americans survive a nuclear war and 4 russian survive; then we’ve won and it was worth it.
either that or it’s like the technological equivalent of the the democratic leadership w disaffected democratic voters leading to defeat in this last election or an elderly driver whose grown children are trying to take away their keys before things get worse; all are refusing to acknowledge the writing on the wall because they think they still got it, but they don’t.
Unsurprising. You don’t have to follow Hector Martin on social media for very long to learn that he’s a petulant, indignant, self-righteous drama queen.
Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds back in the day, just saying…
Some similarities but the main difference in my eyes is that Linus doesn’t have a permanent victim complex.
I’m not going to deny that he can act aggressively, but his point is still valid. The anti-Rust sentiments of some maintainers has slowed down the upstreaming of Rust into the kernel. It doesn’t make sense to waste people’s time by letting R4L limp along in its current state.
R4L either needs to be given the go-ahead to get things upstreamed, to the dismay of some Linux maintainers who don’t like Rust, or R4L should be killed and removed from the kernel so we can stop wasting people’s time.
Personally, I think killing R4L would be a major mistake. Android’s Linux fork with Rust support has been a major success for Google and significantly cut down on vulnerabilities. And the drivers for Apple’s M chips has been surprisingly robust given how new they are and for being reverse engineered.
What is it that rust is less preferable to?
- Dumb culture wars around programming languages.
- It a lot different from C. In C, you have
Typeidentifier variable;, in Rust you havelet mut variable : Typeidentifier;, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. - Some of its safety features (including RAII - a favorite feature of marcan) are both detrimental to the performance and hard or impossible to opt out from.
This news along with the news of WiFi driver maintainer stepping down, feels like there won’t be any new blood in Linux kernel development except for corporate funded developers.
Rust seems to be imperative for security. I hope people in the Linux kernel community put aside their differences and find common ground for the benefit of everyone.
From my perspective as an outsider, there is a lot of apparent hostility and seemingly bad faith engagements going on in this space. Hopefully the reasons are innocuous like them just not wanting to learn a new language, to avoid increasing their workload, or to simply avoid working with the Rust team for whatever reasons they might have.
I would argue that anybody standing in the way of progress and increased security should be moved out of the way. No need for shaming or deep dives, just move the ship forward.
Agreed, especially as the proprietary alternatives are starting to incorporate more and more Rust, even Windows is starting to rewrite their core libraries in Rust.
On top of security though, its going to be important for continuing to bring new maintainers onboard. Less and less people are learning C, especially to a level proficient enough to be a kernel maintainer. As Rust matures even more, C is effectively a legacy language at this point, a C++ won’t be too far behind either, and Linux is going to be hard pressed to find maintainers as the graybeards retire.
Hector posting it to social media, and by his own admission, to shame the C devs, is pretty hostile and bad faith too. Imo it’s the most overt occurrence of hostility here, but no one seems to mind? Are people just completely numb to social media hostilities or smth?
The crucial point is that the people who can work on the kernel now itself are
- c people who don’t know rust yet
- c people who know rust well
The moment we get rust in there, the people who can work on the kernel reliably as a whole are
- c people who know rust well
That’s a much smaller group than the one above.
Here’s the point: THE SAME ISSUE would arise if it were D, or some kind of compiled python, object-oriented bash static objects, if that existed; or anything. Whatever the other language was, it’d present the same risk.
Rust people: it’s not about you. It’s about splitting the codebase.
I always thought kernel devs were smart people. I’m kind of shocked learning a new language is this big of a barrier to them.
The rust people said they’d take ownership of the work for the bindings so C maintainers don’t have to. What’s the issue?
I’m not too new to linux, but also not too veteran, has it always has this shit drama? There is always some sort of fucking child throwing a tantrum about some shit. Has it always been the case? It’s really getting annoying.
This kind of stuff happens in big companies too, but you don’t see it because it’s not in a public mailing list. One of my teams had a developer who stood on tables to yell until his opinion was accepted, and one time when another developer wouldn’t back down, he threw a chair at them. That angry developer worked there for another 7 years until retirement, while many smart team members around him quit rather than continue dealing with him.
Cannot say I’ve seen a dev do that in the UK. Anyone would get fired for throwing a chair. Standing on the table yelling would probably get then a bollocking and maybe a warning.
It depends on how valuable your organization thinks you are; I used to work for a faang company and I got to experience this 2x and the person doing it faced no repercussions since they were well known rockstar software engineers.
Oh, 100% agree he should have been fired or at least put on a PIP, but my HR dept is toothless.
😂. I’d beat the shit out of the mother fucker. I get that he’s a smart developer, but you don’t fucking throw a chair at me, bitch.
Linus needs to step back again. He’s a liability to the kernel’s long term sustainability.
The kernel developers should Come up with a memory safe version of C for developing on the kernel. Kind of like how Git was created.
Rust is already as fast as C and memory safe. The reasons people don’t want it in the kernel basically amount to being a boomer that doesn’t like new things for immaterial reasons. Rust has already proven itself capable in mission-critical applications like drivers.
So… Rust?
Damn, Linus really went out of his way to say:
How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you. You think you know better. But the current process works. It has problems, but problems are a fact of life. There is no perfect. However, I will say that the social media brigading just makes me not want to have anything at all to do with your approach. Because if we have issues in the kernel development model, then social media sure as hell isn’t the solution. The same way it sure as hell wasn’t the solution to politics. Technical patches and discussions matter. Social media brigading - no than\k you.
I wish rust ppl would listen to the maintainers of the 30+ year old c project.
They have decades of experience maintaining and patching contributions made by people who are no longer active and the small request that those contributions be in the language of the project isn’t something to fight against.
It’s really a bummer when skilled developers fall back on stuff like “if shaming on social media doesn’t work, what am I supposed to do?”
Dunno man, when what the dev of 30+ years said was more or less “fuck off”, it seems that advice was in fact heeded
how long until linus intervenes and tells rust haters to shut the fuck up?
