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Comment by grimgrin | Hacker News Reader

linus torvalds

Linus Torvalds greenlit Rust in the kernel, and as a BDFL, he is the one to decide. He has no reason to be upset with any decision because ultimately, all decisions are his own.

If he didn't want Rust in the kernel, he would have said it, and there would have been no Rust in the kernel. It is also the reason why there is no C++ in the kernel, Linus doesn't like C++. It is that simple.

And I respect that, Linux is hugely successful under Linus direction, so I trust his decisions, whatever opinion I have about them.

I only typed Linus Torvald not realizing the person was asking for a "movie character" quite literally, lol. I thought "you mean the guy famous for (among many things..) his behavior?"

This is the first time I've had a comment hit -3 which, I mean, I get it!!

My bad perhaps, in my language Movie and Video and sometimes (Film) are (or can) all be the same word.

I can't find the movie, but there was a guy angry that stated that he should not have to learn Rust, nobody should. And Rust should not be in the kernel.

Its in a talk about File systems in Rust for Linux. Basically the rust maintainer who I think stepped down was talking about how the C-code base for VFS has a lot of documented but complex orderings where you have to call a lock, or pin before accessing an Inode(or something) one way but not the other. They made a bunch of Rust Types so you basically could not produce an illegal ordering and got heckled pretty hard by the "bearded guy". They basically run out the presentation time with heckling and I think the Rust maintainer quit a few months later (over many similar instances of this. don't quote me time line here)

[source] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q

IIRC, the point was actually that they were undocumented in many cases, and that the Rust developers were willing to take on a lot of work, but they would need help with understanding all of the hidden and implicit "rules", but that they had received pushback for simply asking questions or asking for documentation to be comprehensive.

Okay I felt that they were undocumented but I was trying to be charitable to the bearded man :D. I didn't have time to watch the video again haha. But Yeah the push back at the suggestion was very surprising.

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