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What's it like being a user hearing about developer drama.
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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It's not just about memory safety, honestly. Rust is a modern programming language. C is a fucking fossil buried in a tar pit of unmaintained libraries and workarounds. A newly minted programmer won't likely choose C as their primary language when things like C#, Python, and Rust are available (I work in a university, I see what our students do), and the current generation of C-only maintainers will eventually retire, with nobody to replace them. Being openly hostile and abusive against Rust will hurt the kernel in the long term.
This is the Dreadnought effect once again. A new thing appears that thoroughly changes the landscape, and the people who can't adapt push back with fear and violence. Crossbows and arbalests have been effective for centuries, who needs this ridiculous new "gun" thing?
I mean, take a look at it from their POV: You've spent decades building this and suddenly new people come in and want to change very fundamental things in the project. Replacing them with something you don't know and don't want to learn.
Change must be slow and steady and shouldn't make the original developers feel like they're being pushed out.
Both sides are severely lacking in considering the people on the other side.
That's not what's happening. Right now, modules written in Rust are completely independent from modules written in C. If a Rust module wants to interact with a C module, it has to use that module's API, as it is intended. If that API changes, the Rust module has to adapt to it. Nobody is forcing C developers to change anything they don't want to. In the latest tantrum, a kernel developer called Christoph Hellwig was exposed sabotaging Rust projects: he was NACKing Rust PRs that interacted with the DRM API even though they touched none of the code he was maintaining, nor required any changes be made by a C developer. In the fallout, two Asahi/ARM developers left the mainline kernel, and one of them retired completely because of burnout.
Wrong opinions can exist if they are formed using incorrect assumptions. Hellwig had no right to sabotage the Rust projects, and certainly no right to call Rust-for-Linux developers a cancer on the LKML.
People make it sound like its some extreme time consuming task to learn rust. Rust actually gives helpful compiler errors tho and there's a lot of resources online.
I was able to start making some basic things in rust (like an ascii-rendered brute force n-body simulation) with the help of a few google searches after just like 2 days of messing around in my free time. I'm sure reading kernel stuff requires much more advanced knowledge than what I have but it's really not a large barrier.
They are using a shitty language that does almost nothing for them and doesn't guarantee the final binary will do anything close to what the source implies. There's no sides to this. It's just reality.
If they aren't trying to migrate away from it, it's not good. If they actively insist on harassing the people trying to help them migrate away from it, they are the problem.
Well, you should probably read the last sentence of my previous comment, it does apply here as well.
Oh no, I've read your last sentence. The people in one side of that issue are the problem. The issue itself has no sides.