Linux

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.

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.

...but still fails to answer the question of "should we continue implementing kernel things in rust".

There is a reason the type of devs who have the talent, passion and time for projects like this are not spending 60hrs/wk at Google.

That's a good way to take a bad situation and make it better. Good luck! Maybe I'll join you one day.

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.

Unless those old farts die first

They kind of already do. The C used by the kernel team isn't the exact same as what everyone else uses. Mainly because of the tooling they've built around it. I can't remember specifics, but the tooling in place really helps out in that department.

Also, "memory safe C" is already a proposal for the C lang project.

So... Rust?

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.

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.

Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds back in the day, just saying...

It has always been like this.

FOSS land is always going to be populated by freaks and geeks. The well socialized devs get jobs at Google. It's impressive the "system" works as well as it does, IMO. Passion is a big motivator.

There is always some sort of fucking child throwing a tantrum about some shit. Has it always been the case?

Petty much. The big difference this time is that there's a common enemy (Rust) instead of relatively isolated petty crap.