this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Ted is the maintainer of ext4 and there are not many people in the world who understand this code.
For Rust to succeed, it has to get the subsystem maintainers to agree. It is going to be many years of petting very angry bobcats...
And that is not even the worst I've heard, makes you a bit numb if you follow LKML.
Linus is the leader of the kernel project. As a leader, it's his job to get the maintainers to agree. It's not Rust's job to make the C devs stop bullying them.
If Linus thinks Rust is a good direction, he should show it by actually standing up to Ted and developers like him and making them behave.
If he doesn't think it's a good direction, he should say that too, so the remaining Rust devs can stop wasting time on the project.
When someone in a niche part of the project steps down like this, that's a problem with the top-level leadership. Linus' record on leadership is.. mixed. Trending in a good direction the last few years, but this makes me wonder. He can still save this, but he has to want to.
His job is to not get the maintainers to agree, but his job definitely is to bark a bit if somebody behaves like Ted.
It might even be Rust is not meant for Linux kernel and it will never happen. Or it happens in the driver layers, but stays out from the core. We do not know yet. The concern Ted is raising is definitely valid: if the C APIs change, people who work daily in the C code cannot spent cycles fixing the Rust APIs. These people have their day jobs which pays them to maintain these subsystems, and it is at least not yet clear will these employers fund rewriting anything in Rust. There are tens of filesystems in Linux, with lifetimes passing around that are not documented and might not work in Rust.
Note: I'm a Rust dev for the past 10 years, and I follow this discussion with high interest.
No one's saying the points raised are not valid, just that there's no need to be a cunt about it in what should be a professional setting.