The speaker doesn't understand the audience question and doesn't respond to it.
The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's maximally missing the point.
The proposal would cause large classes of changes to C to break the build, which would dramatically slow down kernel development, even if a small handful of Rust volunteers agree to eventually come in and fix the build.
> You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.
I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc. On HN you not infrequently see down voting to indicate disagreement. These clashes with the Linux maintainers look really bad for Rust to me. So bad that I'm pretty convinced Rust as a language is over if they're no longer banging on the technical merits and are instead banging on the table.
I'm sure there are great things about the community. But I would encourage the community to have higher standards of behavior if they want to be taken seriously. The Linux team seem like they're trying to look beyond the childishness because they are optimistic about the technical merits, but they must be so tired of the drama.
> I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc.
I had the same impression.
Why all this drama is 90% of the time around Rust people?
Because many of them are still relatively young. There is nothing wrong with youth, but it can contribute to over-zealousness.
Also, for many of them, Rust is the first systems language they've ever touched. And that fact alone excites them. Because now they can "dream big" too.
But they have bought into the whole C/C++ are by default insecure and therefore garbage. In their mind, no mortal could ever write so much as a single safe function in those languages. So their points of view are always going to be based on that premise.
What they fail to recognize is that an operating system kernel, by virtue of the tasks it has to perform- things like mapping and unmapping memory, reading/writing hardware registers, interacting with peripherals, initiating dma transfers, context switching, etc.- have effects on the underlying hardware and the runtime environment; effects that neither the type system nor the temporal memory safety of Rust can model, because it happens at a level lower than the language itself. Rust's safety guarantees are helpful, but they are not infallible at that level. The kernel literally changes the machine out from under you.
They further fail to appreciate the significant impedance mismatch between C and Rust. When one language has concepts that are in fact constraints that another language simply does not have, there is going to be friction around the edges. Friction means more work. For everyone. From planning to coding to testing to rollout.
So you have well-intentioned, excited, but still self-righteous developers operating from what they perceive to be a position of superiority, who silently look down upon the C developers, and behave in a manner that (to outsiders at least) demonstrates that they really do believe they're better, even if they don't come right out and say it.
Just read the comments in any thread involving Rust. It is inconceivable to them that anybody would be so stupid or naive as to question the utility of the Rust language. To them, the language is unassailable.
The petty drama and social media brigading on top of it, along with the propensity to quit when the going gets tough, it's pretty easy to see why some people feel the way they do about the whole thing.
A programming language is not a religion. It is not a way of life. It is a tool. It's not like it's a text editor or something.
> But they have bought into the whole C/C++ are by default insecure and therefore garbage. In their mind, no mortal could ever write so much as a single safe function in those languages.
No one thinks this except some strawman that you've devised. No point in reading anything else in this comment when this is so blatantly absurd and detached from reality.
All you have to do is read comments from members of the Rust community online, in every public forum where Rust is discussed in any way.
Understand, I am not trying to villainize an entire community of software developers; but for you to say something that's blatantly false is to just stick your head in the sand.
You should try and read the words people write. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum.
Edit: to be clear- I have no problems with Rust the language beyond some ergonomic concerns. I am not a Rust hater, nor am I a zealot. I do advocate for C# a lot for application code though. But I do not deride others' language preferences. You should not dismiss my observations because I used hyperbole. Obviously not every Rust dev thinks you can't write a secure C/C++ function; don't pick out the one hyperbolic statement to discredit my entire post. Bad form.
> The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's maximally missing the point.
You have to encode your API semantics somewhere.
Either you encode them at the type system and find out when it compiles, or you encode it at runtime, and find out when it crashes (or worse, fails silently).
I disagree, they didn't straight out pointed this, because this is nonsense. Semantic changes can break anything, even if it's some intermediary API.
There are more breakage in rust due to the type-system-related semantics, but ideally a C dev would also want their system to break if the semantics aren't right. So this is a criticism on C..?
So following this argument, they don't want Rust because C falls short? Nonsense.
edit: The speaker did mention that they didn't want to force limited use on the base APIs, but that for a great deal of their usage, they could have determined fixed semantics, and make intermediary APIs for it. So this was not about limiting the basic APIs.
Here are the software requirements (inferred from the commenter):
- (1) the C code will be refactored periodically
- (2) when refactored internally it can break C code, but the change author should fix any breaking in C
- (3) Rust must not break when (1) happens
It's the Rust devs' job to meet those requirements if they want to contribute. It looks in the video like they don't understand this, which is pretty basic.
The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's maximally missing the point.
The proposal would cause large classes of changes to C to break the build, which would dramatically slow down kernel development, even if a small handful of Rust volunteers agree to eventually come in and fix the build.
> You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.
I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc. On HN you not infrequently see down voting to indicate disagreement. These clashes with the Linux maintainers look really bad for Rust to me. So bad that I'm pretty convinced Rust as a language is over if they're no longer banging on the technical merits and are instead banging on the table.
I'm sure there are great things about the community. But I would encourage the community to have higher standards of behavior if they want to be taken seriously. The Linux team seem like they're trying to look beyond the childishness because they are optimistic about the technical merits, but they must be so tired of the drama.