Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninjin | Hacker News Reader

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I am not a kernel developer and I do find the discussion somewhat frustrating and I largely agree with your analysis.

However, I do think that the "other side" also raises a valid point in that they can not reasonably be expected to maintain the semantics on the C side so that the Rust bindings (which does make assumptions in order to create clean and powerful bindings to use the Rust type system) do not break. Pre-Rust, the onus is indeed on them to ensure that the entire codebase conforms with any semantic changes, but now, if we say get a new filesystem entirely written in Rust that relies on the bindings, who is responsible and how will the coordination happen?

Again, I am not a kernel developer and only a mediocre (at best) systems programmer. Thus, I could have misunderstood the discussion.

My understanding is that no one's asking them to take on that burden. What seems to be being asked is for them to explain the current semantics of the API, because it's unclear what they actually are.

From the sounds of it, some of them consider this request unreasonable.

That's all fine, I am just talking about the emotional part of the debate and the ad hominems.

They are uncalled and should not be tolerated.

We had a colleague in my last job that was good technician but nobody wanted to talk to him or ask for help or anything because frankly, he was an asshole.

I listened to 3 min of it. And I don't see any emotional part of it.

They simply have a fundamental difference of opinion. And I actually understand the C person is suggesting. Although may be he wasn't clear in explaining it. It is not the responsibility of C maintainer to spend additional time to explain their code. Especially in a way that Rust people understands. And may be in order for them to do that, without all the Rust context, they might as well learn Rust. And if Rust blinding is even set as a priority then all C maintainers would now have obligations, one way or another to work well with rust. Which neither does the C maintainers want to spend time on or have the interest to spend time on.

The Rust people on the other hand saw their move as common good and want everyone to work together. Unfortunately most developers would only discover very late in their carrier, you can only make that happen when everyone 's interest are aligned.

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