I am so glad Linus just came out and said it. I was pretty upset at Hector too in the other thread the other day, and I especially didn’t appreciate a call to remove a major developer from the kernel because Hector wasn’t getting his way. Very militant action on Hector’s part where it just wasn’t necessary.
Hector, if you’re reading this, communication skills are just as if not more important than your Rust development skills, and frankly your communication skills lack.
I can understand their frustration, having multiple other rust for Linux project maintainers quit over nontechnical rust aversion.
And Linus continues to (democratically?) avoid the subject with this response.
As a rust for Linux volunteer you have to be incredibly demoralized reading this mess almost every other month.
@semperverus Just from the small interactions I had with Hector on mastodon I can see he gets very unreasonable about small things and does not accept the possibility that he may be wrong, despite evidence. So leaving linux and mastodon because of rust is totally on brand for him.
So now we’ve lost a very good developer, and the question of rust in the kernel remains unresolved. This is the worst possible outcome.
Part of being a good developer is the “working well with other human beings” part. Linus himself took a hiatus to improve himself in this area.
Another part of being a good developer is to work within and adapting to the frameworks of an existing project, especially if you are joining at a later point. In this context, it would be the R4L folks joining the project known as “the Linux kernel.”
Hector failed on both counts. He has programming skills, but that’s not all that’s required.
Sure, and part of being a good manager is to, you know, manage. It shouldn’t have gotten to the point that marcan is going outside the list to try to get something done. Linus (or someone else with authority, I’m not familiar with who else is managing it) should have stepped in much earlier to head off the drama. It was a very simple question.
Rust in the kernel is already established and part of the mainline kernel. It’s extremely pretty and wholly inappropriate to reject code just because it’s written in rust.
If you had read Christoph’s reasoning, it wasn’t “just because it’s written in Rust.” He actually gave some decent technical reasoning for it that went beyond his original personal outburst (which I hold him to the same standard as Hector for, but he did shore up later and fixed his communication).
How do you figure?
The only two “technical” arguments I could see were firstly that code should
[remain] greppable and maintainable
which unless I’m missing something boils down to “I don’t speak Rust”, and secondly that
The only reason Linux managed to survive so long is by not having internal boundaries, and adding another language complely breaks this
which unless I’m missing something boils down to “I don’t speak Rust”, because ain’t nobody trying to add any other languages to the Linux code base.
Surely this can’t be the “decent technical reasoning” you are referring to? I have to admit I don’t follow kernel development that closely, but I was under the impression that integrating Rust into the code base was a long discussed initiative having the “official” blessing of the higher ups among the maintainers by now, so it seems odd to see it opposed in such harsh terms by a subsystem maintainer here:
I absolutely support using Rust in new codebase, but I do not at all in Linux.
I don’t think this is the worst outcome. It would have been worse if he was the face of Rust in Linux and I’d died out over ten years instead of one.
That being said, hopefully it can get a fresh start.
Tamest Torvalds quote I’ve ever seen so far.
linux is amazing. i dunno what rust is, but ive been using linux a long time. i appreciate the modern comfort. but whatever happens happens. itll still be good.
If code doesn’t change quickly enough, it rusts. Linus makes sure that doesn’t happen
