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Comment by heliumtera | Hacker News Reader

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heliumtera·

>Working in a group of people on a C codebase tends to introduce pain on multiple levels unlike some other languages

linux attracted 2,134 developers in 2025

that kinda weakens your argument a little bit

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It proves the argument as an outlier. I explained in another comment. You often don't have the luxury of selecting the group of people you work with and more often than not, especially these days, people aren't used to (C) way of thinking which just introduces more noise to the communication between people.

Maybe (and I like C, for the record), but it doesn't follow necessarily. It's possible most of those devs were attracted by "working on linux," and are putting up with the pain of collaborative C. I know there's a movement pushing for more Rust.

I think the popularity of Rust for Linux is also in part a reflection of internal discontent with poorly documented and sometimes straight up poorly understood kernel internal APIs.

When a developer asks Can I Fizzle this Doodad? C is comfortable with the answer being "It'll definitely compile but whether it would work is complicated - ask the expert on Fizzling and the Doodad expert, and hope they give the same answer" but Rust wants the answer to be "Yes" or "No" or at the very least, "Here is some actual text explaining when that's fine"

Sometimes it really is hard work to figure this out but for a project as big as Linux even in those cases it's often worth doing that hard work, because you unlock something valuable for every non-expert contributor and Linux has a lot of those.

If Linus started his OS project in 2026, he might have chosen Zig instead of C.

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