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I suppose this can’t be stopped. I hope someone has the resources to curate a working fork of the Linux kernel that doesn’t have all the “improvements” it’s abo

by sk1459 5y ago

I suppose this can’t be stopped. I hope someone has the resources to curate a working fork of the Linux kernel that doesn’t have all the “improvements” it’s about to get.

Flex247A 5y ago
May I ask what is so bad about it?
- sprash 5y ago
  The Rust compiler is very slow and has very high memory requirements. Compiling the Kernel on e.g. older Raspberry Pis is already barely possible and will potentially become completely impossible once rust enters the kernel.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Both gcc and rustc are good at cross-compiling. There are many MCUs that run Linux but definitely are incapable of compiling it. IIRC most of the build time of a rust program is spent not in the rust compilation proper but in LLVM doing code generation and optimization. I hope both LLVM will become more efficient with time, and rust will learn to pass it such IR that it can process faster. There are obvious incentives for both of these things. But of course it would be sad if the minimum requirements to compile the kernel grew again, and now excluded older RPis.
  - Macha 5y ago
    gcc and clang are pretty slow on the scale of all programming languages. Rust is basically the only thing that modern C/C++ compilers are faster than. Should we abandon C and C++ for something else then?
- sk1459 5y ago
  Rust is for writing blog posts about how it’s the most liberating, empowering and inspiring experience of your life. Boring technology like C and Java are for writing software. There’s already an OS completely written in Rust called Redox. Nobody uses it. I’m not entirely sure you could do useful work with it, which is contrary to the Rust marketing team’s talking points that Rust code is guaranteed to be fast and guaranteed to be bug free because Rust is just so darn great and the compiler authors so wonderful and smart. That there are basically no success stories other than a couple side projects after a decade of marketing is of no consequence. Don’t read the blog posts. Go to the repositories. Check out the crates.io landfill. Grab the Rust book and try to write anything more significant than a CLI toy. I promise that you will know exactly why nobody uses the language in anger. The Fuschia team, who are partly responsible for the Rust myth don’t even use it in their kernel. But they want it in Linux. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was all some conspiracy by Google and Microsoft to make a personal computing unusable so that everyone has to use their cloud offerings.
  - Cyph0n 5y ago
    > I wouldn’t be shocked if this was all some conspiracy by Google and Microsoft to make a personal computing unusable so that everyone has to use their cloud offerings. So you would rather believe in a ridiculous conspiracy than admit that large companies might just be choosing Rust for some valid reasons. Got it.
    - sk1459 5y ago
      They aren’t.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Every sufficiently large company is using or has used literally any XYZ you can think of, whether Rust, Forth or even Haskell. Therefore, knowing that there are projects at Google, Facebook, IBM, and Apple using XYZ tells you less than nothing. People pointing at them are either deluded, or seek to delude. A small company that has become a success based on a whole XYZ stack may count for something, depending on how ambitious the company was, how hard it was to do, and how much competition they face. Lots of companies could succeed equally well with Rust, JS, Java, C#, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Erlang, or Perl; those successes don't count. Lots more potter along, neither succeeding nor failing, exactly. Those don't count either, unless you want to give Rust credit for their not exactly failing. And, many fail. We are never told about those. They might well count, but there are a lot of ways to fail. It is ridiculous to believe in a Google conspiracy to outcompete Linux by getting it to incorporate Rust, because a conspiracy requires a crime, and that would not be one. But anyway Google doesn't have that much influence.
      - Cyph0n 5y ago
        Firstly, I disagree with your argument about language adoption being irrelevant. When a language is picked up by a serious player, it helps signal to other users and companies that there might be practical benefits to using the language. Two good examples that come to mind are Erlang/WhatsApp and OCaml/Jane Street. Secondly, there is a huge difference between a language being used in general and a language being used for serious, visible projects within a company. Think: writing a small utility in Zig at company X vs. rewriting the backend of a core product in Zig and pointing to measurable gains in performance and reliability. > It is ridiculous to believe in a Google conspiracy to outcompete Linux by getting it to incorporate Rust [..] Great, but you should be telling that to the user I was replying to.
- sk1459 5y ago
  Better yet, read the epic rant that Zed Shaw made about Ruby. It is certainly juvenile, but I don’t think it’s baseless. Now, consider that the core members of the rust community are exactly the same people he was talking about when rails was the new shiny.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    A bit of an ad hominem, but Zed Shaw’s rants tend to not be the pinnacle of reasoning.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    I don't think that's true. Yehuda and I would be the two people you're talking about (And Yehuda doesn't work on Rust anymore) and we both, as far as I know, appeared a few years after that rant.

by sk1459 5y ago

I suppose this can’t be stopped. I hope someone has the resources to curate a working fork of the Linux kernel that doesn’t have all the “improvements” it’s about to get.

Flex247A 5y ago

May I ask what is so bad about it?

sprash 5y ago
The Rust compiler is very slow and has very high memory requirements. Compiling the Kernel on e.g. older Raspberry Pis is already barely possible and will potentially become completely impossible once rust enters the kernel.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Both gcc and rustc are good at cross-compiling. There are many MCUs that run Linux but definitely are incapable of compiling it. IIRC most of the build time of a rust program is spent not in the rust compilation proper but in LLVM doing code generation and optimization. I hope both LLVM will become more efficient with time, and rust will learn to pass it such IR that it can process faster. There are obvious incentives for both of these things. But of course it would be sad if the minimum requirements to compile the kernel grew again, and now excluded older RPis.
- Macha 5y ago
  gcc and clang are pretty slow on the scale of all programming languages. Rust is basically the only thing that modern C/C++ compilers are faster than. Should we abandon C and C++ for something else then?
sk1459 5y ago
Rust is for writing blog posts about how it’s the most liberating, empowering and inspiring experience of your life. Boring technology like C and Java are for writing software. There’s already an OS completely written in Rust called Redox. Nobody uses it. I’m not entirely sure you could do useful work with it, which is contrary to the Rust marketing team’s talking points that Rust code is guaranteed to be fast and guaranteed to be bug free because Rust is just so darn great and the compiler authors so wonderful and smart. That there are basically no success stories other than a couple side projects after a decade of marketing is of no consequence. Don’t read the blog posts. Go to the repositories. Check out the crates.io landfill. Grab the Rust book and try to write anything more significant than a CLI toy. I promise that you will know exactly why nobody uses the language in anger. The Fuschia team, who are partly responsible for the Rust myth don’t even use it in their kernel. But they want it in Linux. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was all some conspiracy by Google and Microsoft to make a personal computing unusable so that everyone has to use their cloud offerings.
- Cyph0n 5y ago
  > I wouldn’t be shocked if this was all some conspiracy by Google and Microsoft to make a personal computing unusable so that everyone has to use their cloud offerings. So you would rather believe in a ridiculous conspiracy than admit that large companies might just be choosing Rust for some valid reasons. Got it.
  - sk1459 5y ago
    They aren’t.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Every sufficiently large company is using or has used literally any XYZ you can think of, whether Rust, Forth or even Haskell. Therefore, knowing that there are projects at Google, Facebook, IBM, and Apple using XYZ tells you less than nothing. People pointing at them are either deluded, or seek to delude. A small company that has become a success based on a whole XYZ stack may count for something, depending on how ambitious the company was, how hard it was to do, and how much competition they face. Lots of companies could succeed equally well with Rust, JS, Java, C#, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Erlang, or Perl; those successes don't count. Lots more potter along, neither succeeding nor failing, exactly. Those don't count either, unless you want to give Rust credit for their not exactly failing. And, many fail. We are never told about those. They might well count, but there are a lot of ways to fail. It is ridiculous to believe in a Google conspiracy to outcompete Linux by getting it to incorporate Rust, because a conspiracy requires a crime, and that would not be one. But anyway Google doesn't have that much influence.
    - Cyph0n 5y ago
      Firstly, I disagree with your argument about language adoption being irrelevant. When a language is picked up by a serious player, it helps signal to other users and companies that there might be practical benefits to using the language. Two good examples that come to mind are Erlang/WhatsApp and OCaml/Jane Street. Secondly, there is a huge difference between a language being used in general and a language being used for serious, visible projects within a company. Think: writing a small utility in Zig at company X vs. rewriting the backend of a core product in Zig and pointing to measurable gains in performance and reliability. > It is ridiculous to believe in a Google conspiracy to outcompete Linux by getting it to incorporate Rust [..] Great, but you should be telling that to the user I was replying to.
sk1459 5y ago
Better yet, read the epic rant that Zed Shaw made about Ruby. It is certainly juvenile, but I don’t think it’s baseless. Now, consider that the core members of the rust community are exactly the same people he was talking about when rails was the new shiny.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  A bit of an ad hominem, but Zed Shaw’s rants tend to not be the pinnacle of reasoning.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  I don't think that's true. Yehuda and I would be the two people you're talking about (And Yehuda doesn't work on Rust anymore) and we both, as far as I know, appeared a few years after that rant.