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Rust isn’t an invading tribe. It’s just a tool.
People doing open-source work often feel very tribal about their code and block ideas that are good but threaten their position in the community. Essentially same thing as office politics except it's not about money, it's about personal pride.
Fundamentally, if a tool is good and provides benefits then why not use it? You'll be met with concerns about maintainability if you just airdrop something written in Ada/SPARK, but that's fair - just as it was fair that the introduction of Rust in the linux kernel was indeed met with concerns about maintainability. It seems that those were resolved to the satisfcation of the group that decides things and the cost/benefit balance was considered net positive.
https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411#d...
Taken from the above Github discussion regarding Go and Typescript.
Do I treat your post from an obvious throwaway account created 13 minutes ago as somehow representative of the C community or the Linux kernel community or for that matter as representative of any community at all?
Come on, please. There's a ton of things that I consider worth of critisicm in the Rust community, but make a better case.
For all we know it could be the same person behind both the GitHub post and the Hacker News throwaway you're speaking to.
It may be true in this case, but certainly you have seen corporate bloat being added to "open" source projects before.
May not, or may yes. As far as I know with my own interactions with the Linux kernel community, is that it's very different from typical "modern software politics", at least different enough that I'd make the claim they're special from the other communities.
If there is any community I'd assume makes most of their choices disregarding politics or pressures and purely on technical measures, it would be the Linux kernel community. With that said, no person nor community is perfect, but unless there is some hard evidence pointing to that the Linux people were forced to accept Rust into the kernel for whatever reason, then at least I'd refrain from believing in such theories.
That’s “appeal to authority” fallacy.
The people who decided rust has value in the kernel are linux kernel developers. Ie, traditional C developers who see value in using rust in linux. Rust in linux has caused plenty of headaches. If rust didn't add commensurate value to make the trouble worth it, it wouldn't be getting adopted.
- Actually, The collective Linux Kernel found that it was good enough to graduate from the experimental ph—
- Aha! You are appealing to the authority of the Linux Kernel. That’s a fallacy.
"Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own."
-- https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...
People arguing for UNIX/C, also tend to forget the decade of systems languages that predates them, starting with JOVIAL in 1958.
They also forget that after coming up with UNIX/C, they went on to create Plan 9, which was supposed to use Alef, abandoned its designed, later acknowledege lack of GC as an key issue, created Inferno and Limbo, finalizing with contributions to Go's original design.
"Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1][2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3] also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C."[4]"
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)
UNIX and C creators moved on, apparently those that whorship them haven't got the history lesson up to date.
I'm sure your choice of words helps the discussion.
Basically, technology evolves, and you or anyone else can't stop that just because you don't like it for whatever nonsense (non technical) reason.
> nobody is forced to suddenly have to learn a new language, and that people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so.
So any argument that Rust would ever fully replace C in such a way that C would go away and be banned in the kernel is NOT what Linus said.
Rust is less tight. That’s fine for an application, but the kernel is used by everyone who uses Linux.
Rustians disparage C because it doesn’t have Rust behavior.
Why must the kernel have Rust behavior?
No, the 50+ years of ridiculously unavoidable memory corruption errors have done more to disparage C than anyone working in another language.