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I think Theo's reply was a bit excessive in some regards but I can also understand him being frustrated when you've been working on a very complex project for d

by simias 7y ago

I think Theo's reply was a bit excessive in some regards but I can also understand him being frustrated when you've been working on a very complex project for decades and somebody comes around and say "uh, why don't you rewrite it in <hype new language>?". It's seldom a very interesting or constructive discussion. If you think Rust has something to bring to some project then you should at least take the time to write a decent proof of concept or something similar, not ask the current maintainers to rewrite their codebase in Rust/Go/Haskell/Prolog because of some purely theoretical benefits. You don't go to construction workers in the street and tell them that they should consider using different types of hammers.

m4r35n357 7y ago
I think he was very polite.
- simias 7y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that he was rude, merely that his dismissal went a bit too far. He threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. In particular this bit: >As a general trend the only things being written in these new languages are new web-facing applications, quite often proprietory or customized to narrow roles. Not Unix parts. This doesn't really match what I saw of the Rust ecosystem and, even if it did, being able to write proprietary web-facing apps doesn't preclude one from writing "Unix parts". It's as if I said that C++ couldn't be used to write Unix utilities because it's used to write proprietary videogames. It's not a very good argument IMO.
empath75 7y ago
I don’t think Linux or bsd will ever be rewritten in rust nor should they. I do think eventually there will be an os written in rust that surpasses them in popularity, but probably on the time frame of decades.
- qznc 7y ago
  There are not many CVEs for coreutils anyways: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/5075/GNU-Coreutils.html?vendor_id=72 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/5075/GNU-Coreutils.html?v... To improve security, Rust should probably aim to replace libjpeg and other stuff which deals with malicious data a lot.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    coreutils are often run on untrusted data.

by simias 7y ago

m4r35n357 7y ago

I think he was very polite.

simias 7y ago
I didn't mean to imply that he was rude, merely that his dismissal went a bit too far. He threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. In particular this bit: >As a general trend the only things being written in these new languages are new web-facing applications, quite often proprietory or customized to narrow roles. Not Unix parts. This doesn't really match what I saw of the Rust ecosystem and, even if it did, being able to write proprietary web-facing apps doesn't preclude one from writing "Unix parts". It's as if I said that C++ couldn't be used to write Unix utilities because it's used to write proprietary videogames. It's not a very good argument IMO.

empath75 7y ago

I don’t think Linux or bsd will ever be rewritten in rust nor should they. I do think eventually there will be an os written in rust that surpasses them in popularity, but probably on the time frame of decades.

qznc 7y ago
There are not many CVEs for coreutils anyways: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/5075/GNU-Coreutils.html?vendor_id=72 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/5075/GNU-Coreutils.html?v... To improve security, Rust should probably aim to replace libjpeg and other stuff which deals with malicious data a lot.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  coreutils are often run on untrusted data.