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Genuine question: Maybe the pro systemd people meant the word reactionary in it's non-left/right definition? From Wikipedia: "In political science, a reactionary or a reactionist is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society" [0]

I've heard people use 'reactionary' to mean "doesn't want things to change", or "wants things to go back to the way they were", which would actually be a pretty reasonable opinion for a pro-systemd person to have about people opposed to systemd.

(I'm not saying that systemd is or isn't good/bad, but it was definitely a change, so describing people who wanted to keep initd as reactionary does seem to jibe with the definition of reactionary folks as being people who favor going back to the earlier status quo)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

If the anti-systemd weenies wanted to be reactionary edge lords and return to the status quo, then they should have said something when it would have made a difference during the ill-fated transition from the simple BSD init system to the steaming pile of shit AT&T System V init system that they only think is "classic" because their first experience with Unix was Linux.

It's like saying Nickelback's "Woke Up This Morning" is Classic Rock because you never heard of the Rolling Stones "Start Me Up".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyOaCXr8Lw

They didn't. They implied it as a political association. I've since lost the thread unfortunately...

I think that's part of it, but I think they primarily mean politically reactionary. I wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34543573

> These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries

I don't think you are actually referring to the entire Rust community here. Did one person say this on Twitter, and maybe a handful retweet? Besides, what does Rust have to do with systemd?

(Not a Rust user, and don't really have an opinion on systemd.)

>These people once mentioned, on twitter, that people who hate systemd are like reactionaries (as in, politically far right), as if a choice of init is a correlative of political ideology. When you view others' preferences for fucking software as so important to your world view that they might as well be nazis[0], you can tell your priorities are not in order.

I hate that everything is politically-coded nowadays, but, honestly, as much distaste as I feel even writing this, I think they're not entirely wrong / there is something significant underlying that sentiment. Especially post-2014, nearly everything on the internet, including open source technology, is highly entangled with the culture wars. For better or worse, Rust really is left-coded and anti-systemd sentiment really is right-coded. A lot of this stems from the 4chan /g/ (Technology) board's staunch opposition to systemd and Rust + the broad cultural influence 4chan retains to this day. I've been a 4chan regular for over a decade and have seen all sides of this.

I know what I'm saying sounds, and is, utterly ridiculous, but this really actually is a "thing", for some reason. Of course most people who like/dislike systemd or Rust aren't politically motivated or even aware of these associations, but there's a surprisingly large chunk of both who are, even if they aren't really consciously thinking of it in this way. It's very easy and understandable to laugh at someone accusing systemd critics of being neo-Nazis - it's the ultimate Godwin smear/cope - but for a variety of reasons the inverse pretty much does hold: alt-right technologists indeed are near-universally actively opposed to systemd, and generally actively hostile towards Rust. The Rust opposition is in large part due to their belief that Rust and Mozilla are associated with trans people and that if you use Rust you are "pro-trans agenda", "cucked", "pro-Jewish", "pro-globohomo". The systemd opposition is less concrete and seems to be more a matter of happenstance + typical conservatism/"if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Rust is to C what systemd is to /etc/rc. Both C and /etc/rc are defining characteristics of old-school Unix culture, so it kind of makes sense even just on account of that that folks who hate systemd also hate Rust.

What puzzles me is that OpenBSD people seem to be quite actively opposed to Rust too. They are the project that disables hyperthreading for security reasons, runs ld to relink the kernel after every boot to shuffle memory addresses, patches all sorts of software to support capability self-limiting with pledge, and so on. And the idea of using a fast memory-safe language is somehow nonsensical to them. It is hard for me to take this opposition as motivated by security.

If you want to understand how it might be motivated by security, just read the LKML threads around Rust - the Rust developers’ claims are at times pretty wild, and in my experience (after 20 years in infosec), they tend to have a relatively narrow view of “safe”.

I am expecting new vulnerabilities to pop up from developer’s misunderstanding of what Rust actually guarantees, especially in the same memory space as the kernel.

On top of that, Rust implies a huge new bundle of complexity, a second compiler to have bugs in, and a new software supply chain to attack. The language is extremely complex compared to C. These are not easily dismissible problems.

While Rust is definitely a step up from C++ in embedded, I am not convinced bolting it onto existing kernels will fix more potential CVEs than it will cause.

But unlike Linux, OpenBSD is not only the kernel, it is also the userland.

The project could start moving critical software to Rust. They could even write their own crates for this purpose, or fork others’ crates to rule out supply chain attacks.

None of this would be unprecedented for the OpenBSD project. They have forked Apache, OpenSSL, they maintain their own SSH client and server. What would be new is that now all of this would not be happening in C but in another language.

Edit: I don’t even think that the above has to be done in Rust. It could be done in any other modern language. But you also mention the complexity of Rust. In what way do you see it as an infosec problem?

To me it appears that the complexity of Rust is good. The limitations that the language puts on your code give you pain before compilation, not afterwards. It makes you do work that avoids certain kinds of memory and logic bugs.

Do people even use C++ in embedded? Even subsets?

Yes.

You are correct, and that's an excellent analysis.

That's what I was getting at with my comment about how claiming we should go back to the steaming pile of shit System V init system with all its directories full of symlinks they think is "Classic Unix" is like claiming Nickelback's "Woke Up This Morning" is Classic Rock because you never heard of the Rolling Stones "Start Me Up".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34546815

There's definitely an underlying anti-BSD, anti-Berkeley, anti-hippie, anti-Mozilla, anti-woke, anti-gay, anti-trans, pro-Brendan-Eich, pro-GamerGate, alt-right sentiment that runs through all those irrationally ignorant anti-systemd weenies received belief system they parroted from 4Chan.

Would it make more sense to look at it from progressive/conservative lens instead of left/right?

One group thinks change is ultimately a good thing and will make changes for the sake of changes.

Another one thinks change is ultimately a bad thing, and will always oppose it.

Too much change is chaos, too little is stagnation. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

So, this is the problem, you can easily say something is sufficient but it might not be neccessary, or vice versa, implying the converse is often not true. It's does seem silly, but you're right a lot of conservative hackers are anti-systemd, but the converse really isn't true, I don't even think it's like "here are some exceptions" rather than most of the anti-systemd crowd are not reactionaries.

Also, "conservatism" meaning "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is NOT equivalent to political conservatism at all. Conservatives all the time advocate for changes that contradict tradition all the time. Just look at the zoning debates in the US, none of the "keeping X neighborhood sfh" people who argue for it because of "preservation" want to minimize parking to the point they can't fit their f-150s anymore, which dwarf the trucks of the 50s. It has a veneer of "respecting tradition" but they don't really care about tradition in the strict sense. It's like most political ideologies, it centers on a set of values and ideas with justifications that come later.

The left really is the same honestly. While "progressivism" has a nice summary as being "for political change" in some respects, they too respect tradition and history when it fits their aims. It's more correct to say that the sides really have a set of values and ideas that are central, without some overarching central tenet or explanation.

Yeah, I wrote "inverse" but I meant "converse". It's definitely one of those situations, here.

>Also, "conservatism" meaning "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is NOT equivalent to political conservatism at all. Conservatives all the time advocate for changes that contradict tradition all the time.

True. Frankly, I don't know the exact reason why anti-systemd sentiment seems tied up with conservative/reactionary political tendencies (or, more correctly, why the latter seems tied up with the former).

The difference is that Java has alway been driven from the enterprise.

And so there has been this long investment in frameworks, libraries etc that no one would ever otherwise write. Especially areas like governance, security, compliance, reliability etc.

I think Rust is just going to end up just being a better C++ not a true mainstream language.

See this article: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/20/rust_microsoft_c/

* Microsoft Azure's CTO says C and C++ are deprecated

* Most-loved language in StackOverflow dev survey for 7 years running

* Now in the Linux kernel

Sounds like success to me.

When you say enterprise, who do you mean? Rust is absolutely being pushed by faang et al for example. Just look at the bottom of the Rust foundation page[0]. You do not see this support for things like Nim or Julia[1].

[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/

[1] I checked, it looks like intel is funding julia development to some extent. The rest is government research orgs like NSF and DARPA. Okay, that's "large org" support on some scale, although it's clearly because julia is meant for science, not industry.

FAANG isn't what people typically mean with enterprise, they mean programmers writing internal tools at fortune-500 non-tech organisations. It is very different from FAANG and it is usually boring languages like Java or C#. Think of all the COBOL code they had, those programs are still written and now its Java/C# instead of COBOL.

What's a "true mainstream language"?

Impersonal ad-hominen is a great new way to construct an argument.

Or, maybe not that new. "These people to that" without even saying what people you are talking about has been used on politics since forever.