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Comment by agoodusername63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually very critical of how Torvolds treats the people around him and the culture he maintains but this is a rare case when I'm not really against Torvalds on this.

I've had to remove Hector's postings from my feeds because he just constantly bitches and complains about pretty much everything. He's capable, smart, and is doing more than anybody ever will for Apple hardware. But he desperately needs to Stop Posting. Without anybody he works with regularly to give him a reality check, I don't think he's going to change course.

I think Hector has some valid complaints about the contribution process to the kernel, I know. It fucking sucks ass and I've given up on trying. But screaming the way he does is counter productive to improving it

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I feel the exact same. Marcan has done amazing work, and his random blog entries etc have saved me hours of debugging time in the past. But jeez, it is really painful to see him say absolute nonsense like "If shaming on social media does not work, then tell me what does, because I'm out of ideas." - he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.

If Linus thinks that the social media angle is wrong, he should defuse situations before they become explosive because even if one of the devs didn't bring up the drama, there are dozens of news companies that would have printed up articles the second they found the discussion anyway.

Linus should have stepped in long before a maintainer blew their stack and started throwing out ultimatums. Once that happened, Linus could have still stopped everything with one sentence -- "Let me look into this.", but he did not.

Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he says he wants (and will just encourage more of the same).

> Linus only got an opinion once things blew up on social media which proves that social media works which is the exact opposite of what he claims.

That is really an apt point. You can't condition people one way, and tell them to do the opposite.

And it's not _that_ long ago since Linus was King of the arrogant and rude flame posts on what's effectively hos own "social media", the linux kernel mailing list.

10 years back, Linus _was_ "that guy". And it worked, extremely effectively, if you measure success by the ability to stamp on someone else's technical contribution by ridiculing them in public instead of making a convincing technical defense of his position in the discussion.

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

You can expect professionals to not act like trained monkeys.

What happens when Linus retires (or god forbid dies)? He can't defuse those situations forever, there needs to be some sort of process.

Someone will have to take over Linus' role. There's no way that kernel development can work without a person in charge, at least not in anyway that is remotely similar to today.

Not being remotely similar to today could be a very good thing.

If you can point to a better model of a more successful kernel that would be interesting to read about.

FreeBSD? But there is nothing fundamentally different in open-source project management between a kernel and any other large open-source project. The linux code base is the largest, but not by a large margin. Chrome, GCC, OpenOffice, Android (excluding the linux part obvs.), and the various BSDs are all comparable in scope, complexity, lines of code, and number of contributors. Only linux is (in)famous for having a toxic and unproductive culture.

Odd. Linux is by far the most/largest/longest successful project. Or do you have a counterexample?

I assume we're only comparing to operating systems, as I would say that e.g. Chrome as an open-source project is just as impactful if not more so. But generally speaking the Linux support experience is decidedly worse than *BSD or any proprietary OS. It is much harder to get patches upstreamed, and many hardware have errata that never get fixed. (If you haven't experienced this, it might be because companies like canonical and red hat maintain their own patches to support their customers.)

> But generally speaking the Linux support experience is decidedly worse than *BSD or any proprietary OS.

Going to have to disagree on that one.

Good for who? External parties that want to force their vision of what the project should be?

Well... the maintainer also shouldn't blow their stack

You can certainly imagine ways an authority figure could have defused a situation of a maintainer blowing their stack, but your framing kinda absolves the maintainer of any accountability for their actions.

A team member who needs a lot of defusing is doing something wrong, and needs to learn how to defuse themselves.

Linus, as someone far removed from LKML, seems like he hates external visibility of what he wants to be effectively "internal" discussion more than anything else.

Not in the sense of "he wants the mailing lists private", but in the sense that "he doesn't want public complaint about private discussions", which feels like an evolution of "technical merit should win", as a position.

I dont think Linus gives a damn about any social media drama. Why should he care?

It just ("just") sounds like he's out of alignment with the kernel development process.

That shouldn't be too surprising - I mean, its an old project with a whole lot of technical baggage. Projects tend to slow down over time. And that is legitimately really frustrating when you want to shake things up or push for change. I would be rubbish as a linux kernel developer. I have the wrong temperament for it.

There's a reason why some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.

And when you're in a situation like that, your choices are essentially Voice or Exit. Voice is to do what he's tried to do - kick up a fuss about the problems to try and get them fixed. Thats a skill on its own - and it sounds like he's not been super effective at that. The other option is Exit. Which of course - sensibly, he's now done.

> he has gotta Stop Posting and keep those kinds of thoughts away from his keyboard.

Nah. Bottling this stuff up is a bad long term play. You end up getting bitter, cynical and resentful. I think we've all worked with people like that, and its miserable - both for the person and for their coworkers. I think its better to shoot your shot. Even if you miss - as he has here - you learn a lot about yourself and the world. And there's no shortage of interesting projects out there to work on. Pick something that matches your speed.

> some tech companies interview for both technical skill and culture fit. Sounds like he's got the technical chops, but he's not a good fit for linux.

You're right.

To fit with historical "linux culture" he needs to be much more aggressive and rude.

He needed to lead with something more inline with linux project leadership's examples, perhaps something like: Christoph " ... should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants

Yeah, reading these back in 2025 it's amazing Linux got as far as it did with Linus being like this for a long time.

But this is just frustration coming out. I don’t think for a moment he expected shaming on social media to work.

But it did work. Linus actually got involved because of it...

If we were dealing with a toddler, one could blame the parent for rewarding their misbehaviour attention... an adult developer not so much

I've said this before, but the rust community really seems to attract the most toxic and drama-thumping types as their icons. I'm not really sure why such types are drawn to it.

This.

From shaming everything else as either slow or unsafe to rewrite the universe, the Rust community makes it hard for new comers to consider the language by its merit.

But the good thing is, the hype has settled down and Rust has found its niche. It’s not tackling Go or Python anytime soon and competes in a different plane.

Zig is another great alternative for someone like me who never found Rust a pleasant language to work with.

This is not because of Rust, but C.

Who are these icons?

This is profoundly silly.

First of all because we're talking about the kernel community here, which was incredibly toxic and dramatic long before Rust even existed. Linus has chilled out in the past few years but that legacy isn't entirely gone.

C++ drama has nearly come to fistfights at conferences, and the only reason that doesn't get talked about more is that the toxicity stays mostly on private (not public) mailing lists as a result of the more insular nature of that ecosystem. Nowadays you have a lot of people just quitting over things like the fact that a member of the standard committee was convicted on CSAM charges.

There are plenty of "C supremacists" in the tech influencer community and the maintainer mailing list of every distribution.

And streamers like PrimeTime that eagerly jump on every opportunity to shit on Rust and actively dump gasoline on every flareup of drama for ad revenue.

In general, programmers seem to love being elitist about languages and tools. Remember how everyone used to dump on PHP constantly?

I'm a Rust coder who also occasionally watches Prime, and I've never seen Prime casually pour gasoline on fires. Yes his whole business model is reacting to whatever content is hot right now, but he always does so in a considerate and non inflammatory manner.

He's not a fan of Rust for totally legitimate reasons.

If not Rust, what does he prefer? Zig?

Yeah, mostly Golang and Zig I think.

He is apparently mostly a Golang guy, and has stated he would play around/experiment with Zig. However, this was against the advice of Muratori (who does not like Zig), and suggested Jai (preferred choice) or Odin.

Discussions on the internet often were dramatic. There are certainly also many "C supremacists", but I don't generally see C people coming to C++ or Rust projects and insisting that it should be rewritten in C because "C is better". I believe C is a better language myself and definitely much better than how it is currently perceived, but I do not mind if other people have a different opinion and do projects using other languages. While the mindset of many C++ and Rust proponents seems to be that "C has to die", so is inherently much more hostile. This makes it then sometimes difficult to ignore this completely.

My experience with Rust and people who use Rust has actually been great.

There seems to be an entire second world of “Rust community” and Rust zealots online who are heavy on the drama, though. It really does feel like an alternate Rust universe.

Although when I think about it, several of my other interests and hobbies are exactly like this. Great in the real world, but as soon as you step into certain online spaces it’s drama and toxicity.

In this specific case, I think this is more about kernel drama than Rust drama.

I don't think that's true. I think the C guys told themselves that writing safe C code is just a matter of skill, but data shows that the amount of skill necessary to avoid writing unsafe C just isn't there. The average C developer isn't as competent as they claim.

You can lie to yourself and say that the same security problems exist in other languages, but that isn't true.

When I check the vulnerabilities marked as HIGH on a JVM based project, it's often banal stuff like a denial of service in Spring. The consequences of an attack are a few days of downtime until we patch the library, but the truth is that while downtime on our application might be profitable for a competitor, it's not profitable for a black hat hacker working alone. They can't blackmail us, because we can update the library without paying them to stop.

Meanwhile the average C vulnerability is usually some form of RCE that would let the hacker install ransomware.

Java also had its share of remote code execution attacks. Security is quite complex domain and it is not just memory overwrites that can allow RCE attacks. Though I can agree that in average C/C++ is more vulnerable.

Most CVEs for Java are about untrusted code escaping the sandbox. No one is saying JavaScript is a bad language for server side development despite browser sandboxes constantly leaking.

Yes, there was a popular logger library that was written badly that tried to interpret log messages as potential source for fetching code dynamically from remote locations. Something that was thought to be the future 25 years ago, but had mostly been abandoned in all modern code.

I think already phrasing it like this "the C guys" is inflammatory and not helpful. The C community is huge and there is also a large part interested in more secure programming. Also the idea that tall C code is hopelessly unsafe while all Rust code is perfectly memory safe are both far from the truth. In reality, you can make C code quite good and you make Rust code very unsafe. While Rust certainly has some advantage, this is not as black-and-white as the Rust marketing wants you to believe. But this fuels the "C must die" and "we are on the right side of history and if you can not see this, you are an enemy" lines of thinking some people have.

It also doesn't help that the Rust comes with more than just the safty changes. The expectations for development models, distribution models, backwards compatibility guarantees not to mention the cultural aspects are very different which is the real reason it causes so many clashes.

It get pushed with the argument for better memory safety but then wants to change the entire world as well.

Rust is sadly more about marketing than actually being popular or safe.

That stackoverflow survey rust folks so proudly crow about shows it’s the #1 ‘admired’ language, well #2 was closure and Zig over the years which clearly shows the value of the survey. Just marketing slop.

The rust produces safe code claim is also marketing garbage. The rust standard library has over 7.5k (of 35k) unsafe functions in it. The core library has 7K (of 21k) unsafe functions. So any Rust program that claims not to have “unsafe” code is most likely not true since any program that doesn’t use the standard library is a toy.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/verify-the-safety-of...

The rust community unearned arrogance is only surpassed by the Haskel folks. It’s breathtaking. Yes yes not all in the rust community are like this, but the social media amplified squeaky wheels one sure are loud.

> The rust produces safe code claim is also marketing garbage. The rust standard library has over 7.5k (of 35k) unsafe functions in it. The core library has 7K (of 21k) unsafe functions. So any Rust program that claims not to have “unsafe” code is most likely not true since any program that doesn’t use the standard library is a toy.

Why does any of that imply that Rust doesn't produce safe code? There's no argument here - just some numbers and unjustified conclusions.

Google has published direct evidence of Rust improving memory safety in practice: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

> To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code.

That was 2022. I am aware of at least one security bug in their Rust code, but it wasn't a memory safety issue. I'll be interested to see what they say when they post updated numbers.

> "The rust produces safe code claim is also marketing garbage. The rust standard library has over 7.5k (of 35k) unsafe functions in it. The core library has 7K (of 21k) unsafe functions."

"it’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any other of Rust’s safety checks"[1]. Using the Rust keyword 'unsafe' doesn't make the code inside it the Wild West or automatically an exploit or a problem, it is a limited-scope relaxing of only some checks.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html

Any trending language will attract some not so great people who make their choice of a shiny language their whole personality. It's really a pity for rust to be in that position now, as those people are there for the feeling of superiority and will cause drama to get it

If rust ends up being mainstream successful, those people will move on to something else and start attacking rust for whatever they feel their new language is superior in

Someone should have hugged them when they were kids

This is unfortunately my take with almost every interaction I had with the Rust community. Expressing any diverging opinion is enough to get ostracized.

Like others have mentioned it was really the hypocrisy of this guy that made me side against him, not so much whether he was right or wrong.

He's a known, certified, card-carrying obnoxious rebel coming pretty close to violating a "Code of Conduct" himself pretty well every other day then his beef with Christoph about wanting to "mix languages" (C and Rust, of course) and Christoph said "I'm maintaining it and I'm not doing it, it's like a cancer" (I'm paraphrasing and he was notably not talking about Rust itself but "mixing" C and Rust) then Martin exploding and screaming that Christoph said "cancer" and that he had violated a Code of Conduct. Please.

A serious case of the pot calling the kettle black.

> then his beef with Christoph about wanting to "mix languages" (C and Rust, of course) and Christoph said "I'm maintaining it and I'm not doing it, it's like a cancer"

You don't even take time to figure out who's the commit author.

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