Marcan links to an email by Ted Tso'o (
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]...) that is interesting to read. Although it starts on a polarising note ("thin blue line"), it does a good job of explaining the difficulties that Linux maintainers face and why they make the choices they do.
It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining it after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after. It also makes sense to relax that attitude for someone in the old boys' network because you know they'll help maintain it in the future. So far so good. A really good look into his perspective.
And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false?
- "an upstream language
community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility
guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug.
- "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler
implementation" - except that isn't true? Here's the maintainer on the gccrs project (a second Rust compiler implementation), posting on the official Rust Blog -> "The amount of help we have received from Rust folks is great, and we think gccrs can be an interesting project for a wide range of users." (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...)
This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful.
It makes sense to be extremely adversarial about accepting code because they're on the hook for maintaining it after that. They have maximum leverage at review time, and 0 leverage after. It also makes sense to relax that attitude for someone in the old boys' network because you know they'll help maintain it in the future. So far so good. A really good look into his perspective.
And then he can't help himself. After being so reasonable, he throws shade on Rust. Shade that is just unfortunately, just false?
- "an upstream language community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug.
- "which is actively hostile to a second Rust compiler implementation" - except that isn't true? Here's the maintainer on the gccrs project (a second Rust compiler implementation), posting on the official Rust Blog -> "The amount of help we have received from Rust folks is great, and we think gccrs can be an interesting project for a wide range of users." (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/07/gccrs-an-alternative-c...)
This is par for the course I guess, and what exhausts folks like marcan. I wouldn't want to work with someone like Ted Tso'o, who clearly has a penchant for flame wars and isn't interested in being truthful.