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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 18th, 2023
  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”
    2·
    2 months ago

    Lol the out of memory error was a joke. A reference to that two people both trying to do the same thing will fill the heap since there’s unnecessary work.

    I tried to make a code joke but it failed.

    As far as what are they unwilling to release? Control. Ownership of any bit of the kernel they control

    kernel maintainer Ted Ts’o, emphatically interjects: “Here’s the thing: you’re not going to force all of us to learn Rust.”

    Lina tried to push small fixes that would make the C code “more robust and the lifetime requirements sensible,” but was blocked by the maintainer.

    DeVault writes. “Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work – and it’s a lot of coding work.”

  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”
    24·
    2 months ago

    It’s a whole different ballgame. I’ve written a good amount of C and C++ in my day. I’ve been learning Rust for a year or so now. Switching between allocating your own memory and managing it, and the concept of “Ownership” https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is-ownership.html is just something many devs set in their ways aren’t willing to do.

    I understand where they’re coming from, I’ve gone through massive refactors with new tech in my career. I think this approach needs to be more methodical and cautious than it is, but I don’t think they are correct in the end result. I think a memory-safe language is the way to go, and it needs to happen.

    This to me is a classic software project with no manager and a bunch of devs arguing internally with no clear external goals. There needs to be definitive goals set over a timeline. If someone doesn’t agree after a consensus is reached they can leave the project. But as of now I think as others have said this is 80% infighting, 20% actual work that’s happening.

  • kautau@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Rust in Linux lead retires rather than deal with more “nontechnical nonsense”
    141·
    2 months ago

    But on the other hand you can’t expect some smaller and smaller subset of the population to primarily just learn C and meet the criteria of a kernel dev.

    I absolutely agree with all your points, and most rust devs would agree, but the general idea is that over time that energy (which would have been spent tweaking malloc and such) should be spent on the rust compiler and memory management systems, which is already magic as someone who as written a lot of c, c++, and spent the better part of a year learning rust. (I’m no expert of course, but I have a pretty decent grasp on the low level memory management of both the Linux kernel and the rust compiler).

    So that over time the effort that would be spent on memory management and kernel functionality can be properly divided. Rust not being efficient somewhere in catching memory faults or managing memory? Fix it. Someone writing unsafe rust code? Fix it.

    I think at the end of the day everyone wants the same thing which is a memory safe kernel, and I think that rust Is being shoehorned into kernel projects too early in places where it shouldn’t be, but I also think there is unnatural resistance to it just because it’s different elsewhere to “how it’s always been done.”