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> One of the common refrains is that the Rust community pushes people into doing these sorts of things. Not the person you asked, but I've never seen anyone cl

> One of the common refrains is that the Rust community pushes people into doing these sorts of things. Not the person you asked, but I've never seen anyone claim this happens before. Yes there's plenty of people pushing things to be rewritten in Rust, but those always fall on deaf ears and don't really accomplish much. Rust rewrites are always from an activist insider, or sometimes the repository maintainer themselves, pushing for the rewrite, not from any external people not associated with the project. It would be highly surprising to me if any external commentator pushing for a Rust rewrite has ever succeeded in convincing the maintainers to do so. That's just not how open source works.

djur 4y ago
Anecdotally I've seen plenty of people talk about the Rust-in-Linux endeavor like it was a gang of door-to-door missionaries that banged on old man Torvalds' door until he begrudgingly let them come in for a cup of coffee. I don't think people make a big distinction between "activist insiders" and "activist outsiders" in this context.
- mlindner 4y ago
  I'm not a part of the endeavor and only have looked in from the outside by reading some of the mailing list archives but it never looked to me like it was a result of what you describe. Torvalds was welcoming from the get go, even name dropping Rust years before the Rust-in-Linux endeavor even started (which likely helped prompt the endeavor in the first place). Here's what he said way back in August of 2016, just barely over a year after Rust hit 1.0 in May of 2015. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux-at-25-linus-torvalds-on-the-evolution-and-future-of-linux.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux-at-25-linus-... > Q: What do you think of the projects currently underway to develop OS kernels in languages like Rust (touted for having built-in safeties that C does not)? > Linus Torvalds: That's not a new phenomenon at all. We've had the system people who used Modula-2 or Ada, and I have to say Rust looks a lot better than either of those two disasters. > I'm not convinced about Rust for an OS kernel (there's a lot more to system programming than the kernel, though), but at the same time there is no question that C has a lot of limitations.

djur 4y ago

Anecdotally I've seen plenty of people talk about the Rust-in-Linux endeavor like it was a gang of door-to-door missionaries that banged on old man Torvalds' door until he begrudgingly let them come in for a cup of coffee. I don't think people make a big distinction between "activist insiders" and "activist outsiders" in this context.

mlindner 4y ago
I'm not a part of the endeavor and only have looked in from the outside by reading some of the mailing list archives but it never looked to me like it was a result of what you describe. Torvalds was welcoming from the get go, even name dropping Rust years before the Rust-in-Linux endeavor even started (which likely helped prompt the endeavor in the first place). Here's what he said way back in August of 2016, just barely over a year after Rust hit 1.0 in May of 2015. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux-at-25-linus-torvalds-on-the-evolution-and-future-of-linux.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux-at-25-linus-... > Q: What do you think of the projects currently underway to develop OS kernels in languages like Rust (touted for having built-in safeties that C does not)? > Linus Torvalds: That's not a new phenomenon at all. We've had the system people who used Modula-2 or Ada, and I have to say Rust looks a lot better than either of those two disasters. > I'm not convinced about Rust for an OS kernel (there's a lot more to system programming than the kernel, though), but at the same time there is no question that C has a lot of limitations.