Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer

[satansmaggotycumfart@lemmy.world]

Ossify is up there with moist in my list of favourite words.

[templa@beehaw.org]

Yes I read the whole thread and the lack of replies on his part were kind of infuriating

[horsey@lemmy.world]

What is it that rust is less preferable to?

[thewebguy@lemmy.ml]

Agreed, especially as the proprietary alternatives are starting to incorporate more and more Rust, even Windows is starting to rewrite their core libraries in Rust.

On top of security though, its going to be important for continuing to bring new maintainers onboard. Less and less people are learning C, especially to a level proficient enough to be a kernel maintainer. As Rust matures even more, C is effectively a legacy language at this point, a C++ won't be too far behind either, and Linux is going to be hard pressed to find maintainers as the graybeards retire.

[demizerone@lemmy.world]

The kernel developers should Come up with a memory safe version of C for developing on the kernel. Kind of like how Git was created.

[corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca]

The crucial point is that the people who can work on the kernel now itself are

• c people who don't know rust yet
• c people who know rust well

The moment we get rust in there, the people who can work on the kernel reliably as a whole are

• c people who know rust well

That's a much smaller group than the one above.

Here's the point: THE SAME ISSUE would arise if it were D, or some kind of compiled python, object-oriented bash static objects, if that existed; or anything. Whatever the other language was, it'd present the same risk.

Rust people: it's not about you. It's about splitting the codebase.

[programmingsocks@pawb.social]

Rust is already as fast as C and memory safe. The reasons people don't want it in the kernel basically amount to being a boomer that doesn't like new things for immaterial reasons.

[expr@programming.dev]

So... Rust?

[ahal@lemmy.ca]

I always thought kernel devs were smart people. I'm kind of shocked learning a new language is this big of a barrier to them.

[ceebee_eh@lemmy.world]

They kind of already do. The C used by the kernel team isn't the exact same as what everyone else uses. Mainly because of the tooling they've built around it. I can't remember specifics, but the tooling in place really helps out in that department.

Also, "memory safe C" is already a proposal for the C lang project.

[lefantome@programming.dev]

Not a fork of course but there is Redox

https://www.redox-os.org/

[lefantome@programming.dev]

No. The kernel does not care about X11 vs Wayland. Or rather, both X11 and Wayland use KM| ( Kernel Mode Setting ) and DRM ( Direct Rendering ) these days. That is, both X11 and Wayland call on the same kernel features.

[lefantome@programming.dev]

RISC-V is the “new” CPU architecture

[robertomorrison@lemmy.world]

Even “smart people” have resource/time limitations. Learning rust to an extent that will work on that level is not the same as learning C.

[dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

The rust people said they'd take ownership of the work for the bindings. What's the issue?

[industrystandard@lemmy.world]

Does the kernel not need a lot of memory unsafe Rust code? There is a way to bypass the safety nets and I heard that for stuff like kernel development that is necessity.

[integrate777@discuss.online]

Hector posting it to social media, and by his own admission, to shame the C devs, is pretty hostile and bad faith too.

[andrewd18@midwest.social]

This kind of stuff happens in big companies too, but you don't see it because it's not in a public mailing list. One of my teams had a developer who stood on tables to yell until his opinion was accepted, and one time when another developer wouldn't back down, he threw a chair at them. That angry developer worked there for another 7 years until retirement, while many smart team members around him quit rather than continue dealing with him.