Linus ain't wrong tho
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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He is totally correct and it is great to see him finally step in to settle this drama. Hopefully it will reduce the level of noise going forward.
I really appreciated him saying 'I don't want yes men, I need people to call me on my bullshit, but I'm calling you out on yours'.
I read through the next few replies, and it seems like the anti-rust maintainer just has an axe to grind and can't stand people working in a language they don't understand.
He understands Rust and claims to like it. He simply disagrees with the decision to have a mixed language kernel and is trying to unilaterally stop it from happening.
Gee Linus you think you could've fucking said something before it got to this point?
Sometimes you gotta let people try to resolve things on their own first.
Yes but that clearly was not happening. And now they lost a contributor for no reason.
I'd venture to guess this isn't the first time Linus has had to deal with devs who have ideological disagreements and one quits. It's not also his job to keep that from happening. What he said is true, there's a process they have for maintaining Linux, and it doesn't involve flame wars on social media.....it involves flame wars over email 😅.
But seriously, if a devs are going to get upset at each other and rage quit, it's not Linus' job to play mediator.
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Yah took him long enough and should have never got to this point. Now we have lost a contributer.
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Internal politics is a bitch 😩
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People really afraid of Rust out here.
It literally wasn't about Rust specifically though. Christoph literally said it was about anything that was not C, including assembly, C++, brainfuck, or whatever, entering the kernel. Christoph likes Rust. Christoph (rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
(rightfully) does not like mixed language codebases for projects as large and important as Linux
You make it sound like it's a matter of taste rather than a technical one (and I suspect it actually might be just about taste in the end)
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Not his call, as we can see now
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I can relate. I can emphasize with someone who's learned every nuance of a language, and after 30-40 years suddenly these kids come in with their strange hieroglyphics slowly replacing everything you've worked on.
Except that's literally the reality with computers. Everything evolves and things go obsolete. I'm sure the COBOL and Fortran programmers were pissed when the kids started using C too.
A lot of people commenting on this seem to have gaps in their knowledge of what happened. I highly recommend reading the linked email, as it is both short and has valuable context.
Is there an easy way of seeing the preceding emails in a threaded format?
I read some posted yesterday that were related but it's damn confusing whether the conversation has been active in between?
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Anyone got more context on this I can read through? I haven't kept up with this other than Linus's notorious attitude.
Someone submitted some code to the Linux kernel. One of the maintainers repeatedly denied it for no reason other than it contained code that is not C. A different contributor became very angry, lashed out publicly on social media, accused the maintainer of sabotaging R4L for no technical reason, then removed themselves from the project. They were also the founder of Asahi Linux and resigned from that as well.
It's nothing to do with Rust, specifically.
Marcan is not the submitter. Unless I've missed something, the submitter is still working on the patch.
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It's mostly in that linked thread. The high level of it is a guy wanted to push Rust code. The maintainer said no it would mean the API for this would be tied to Rust and that is unacceptable. It cause another big contributer to throw a fit and Linus said he can't be everyone's mom. They kept fighting for like 2 months apparently? Now Linus stepped in, looked at the code and said the Rust code clearly doesn't impact the API in the way the maintainer was saying it just breaks itself if the maintainers allow changes to the API.
I kinda dislike the idea that it's cool for people to contribute code that is so easy to break. I have a feeling after it happens a few times they are going to claim that it is being done intentionally and that the slap fights will carry on.
I do not know why you say it is easy to break.
The Rust team are maintaining their side. I do not expect it to break. And the C code that the Rust code depends on is used by lots of other code. It should be a stable interface. Changing the C code just to break the Rust code would break a lot of C code too and upset a lot of folks.
And the who point is to create a more idiomatic interface on the Rust side. So, even if the c interface does change, it may only be a small amount of Rust code that needs to change in response.
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Thanks for the summary, I did a bit of reading myself. It's interesting the dynamics at play here - you've got a long, long term contributor in Hellwig who's been a maintainer since before Rust even existed, then you've got quite a few people championing Rust being introduced into the kernel. I feel like Hellwig's concerns must have more to do with the long term sustainability of the Rust code - like will there be enough Rust developers 10, 20, 30 years down the line. I mean, even if it stays maintained, having multiple languages in a codebase increases complexity and makes it harder to contribute. Then you have Filho resigning from the Rust for Linux project, which in itself kind of calls into question the long term sustainability of the project. It seems like Rust would have quite a few benefits for the Linux kernel, but the question remains of if it's still gonna be any good in a few decades. This is juicy stuff!
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