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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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Ted Ts'o is a prick with a god complex. I understand his experience is hard to match, we all have something in our lives we're that good at, but that does not need to lead to acting like a fucking religious fanatic.
No intention of validating that behavior, it's uncalled for and childish, but I think there is another bit of "nontechnical nonsense" on the opposite side of this silly religious war: the RIIR crowd. Longstanding C projects (sometimes even projects written in dynamic languages...?) get people that know very little about the project, or at least have never contributed, asking for it to be rewritten or refactored in Rust, and that's likely just as tiring as the defensive C people when you want to include Rust in the kernel.
People need to chill out on both sides of this weird religious war. A programming language is just a tool: its merits in a given situation should be discussed logically.
I imagine this mentality is frustrating because of how many times they have to explain that they weren't forcing people to learn Rust and that the Rust bindings were second class citizens. They never said to rewrite the kernel in Rust.
That's disengenuous though.
We're not forcing you to learn rust. We'll just place code in your security critical project in a language you don't know.
Rust is a second class citizen, but we feel rust is the superior language and all code should eventually benefit from it's memory safety.
We're not suggesting that code needs to be rewritten in rust, but the Linux kernel development must internalise the need for memory safe languages.
No other language community does what the rust community does. Haskellers don't go to the Emacs project and say "We'd like to write Emacs modules, but we think Haskell is a much nicer and safer functional language than Lisp, so how about we add the capability of using Haskell and Lisp?". Pythonistas didn't add Python support to Rails along side Ruby.
Rusties seem to want to convert everyone by Trojan horsing their way into communities. It's extremely damaging, both to those communities and to rust itself.
It doesn't help that the Rust community tends to bring extremely divisive politics with it in places and ways that just don't need to happen, starting battles that aren't even tangentially related to programming.
That is the most sensible look into this so far.