Because someday the programming state of the art must advance beyond 1970, and someday we must stop introducing new memory safety bugs that cause horrific vulnerabilities, and for kernel code we don't have the luxury of recompiling everything with garbage collection turned on as a band-aid for C's incurable defects.
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.
Why? It depends on what you want to replace, but the Rust project has a long history of using tools written in other languages. Python is used a lot in build tooling, bors-ng was written in Elixir, llvm is written in c, ... gcc-rs doesn't contain a lot of rust code either, it's purely other languages according to https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs
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.
If anyone submitted such a PR to one of my projects and could explain compelling benefits for why doing so would be a general improvement, even considering trade-offs of increased complexity/maintainability, etc., then I'd be delighted they'd cared enough to improve my software.
How is the drive-by statement of a random GH account with 9 followers representative of any community. What's the point you're trying to make? That there's people with shitty behavior in the Rust community? No surprise here, there are. That there's trolls out there that just do this for fun? It's the internet! I hope that doesn't surprise anyone by now.
How is the one comment from a GH account with 18 followers, no contribution to the Rust project (or any Rust based project at all) and mostly contributions to javascript projects in any way representative of the Rust community? Especially taken out of context - in context it seem like a failed(?) attempt at humor or sarcasm.
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.
> 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?
For all we know it could be the same person behind both the GitHub post and the Hacker News throwaway you're speaking to.
I’m not really sure what point you’re making. All I see there is - or was - some unclear management within Linux itself.
- There was an experiment to have rust in Linux. It got provisional approval from Linus.
- Some people in the Linux kernel blocked essentially any changes being made to make the rust experiment able to succeed.
- Some people who were trying to get rust into Linux got frustrated. Some quit as a result.
- Eventually Linus stepped in and told everyone to play nice.
This whole drama involved like 5 people. It’s not “the majority of the rust community”. And it kinda had nothing to do with rust the language. It was really a management / technical leadership challenge. And it seems like it’s been addressed by leadership stepping in and giving clearer guidelines around how rust and C should interoperate, both at a technical and interpersonal level.
So what’s your point? Is rust bad because some people had an argument about it on the Linux kernel mailing list about it? ‘Cos uh, that’s not exactly a new thing.
Add in theseus, tock, hubris, and hermit-os. That is just the non academic ones. As for why none of them are widely used? Drivers. It wasn't that long ago redox didn't even support usb devices. The linux kernel is a giant mashup of oodles of drivers.
The "provide value" argument can be used for anything. Modern software politics and foundation sponsorship pressure are so complex that this argument may not even be true.
It may be true in this case, but certainly you have seen corporate bloat being added to "open" source projects before.
> Modern software politics and foundation sponsorship pressure are so complex that this argument may not even be true.
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.
You're right that I'm appealing to authority, but that doesn't make my argument invalid.
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.
They wrote their own language (C) too. They invented a new language because the current crop of languages didn't suit their needs. Your argument ignores the parts of history that are inconvenient and highlights the ones that you think support it.
"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."
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]"
I think when Fish shell announced the Rust rewrite, they especially highlit that, in the form of "being more attractive to contributors" as one of the reasons.
In-general it seems that Rust proponents want ease and modernity to replace the ability to do the same in C better, with more control and intent, and with better results.
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.
I don't think C should be disparaged at all. Just because I prefer torx screws doesn't mean phillips screws were a horrible idea. They were brilliantly simple and enormously effective. I can't think of a single situation in which I wouldn't prefer torx, but torx wasn't an option historically and phillips was not the wrong decision at the time. Times change.
