I heard a PeerTuber I follow talk about controversy around “Rust” as a dangerous cult or something, but that she thinks people should put aside their “petty grievances” and focus more on what good the project will do for Linux. I’m out of the loop, but I think Rust is a programming language, right? Anyone know what this whole thing about a cult is? I want to be filled in on it, because it seems important.
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I’m not sure about a full-on cult, but the people who push Rust push Rust REALLY, REALLY HARD. And they frame any opposition as “you just need to GET WITH THE TIMES!!!”.
Much like the Wayland people, and the systemd people.
Personally, that massively turns me off. Especially because when I tried rust, it tried to force us to use snake_case instead of camelCase in our OWN CODE, throwing up “style warnings”. That’s not okay.
It feels like they want to end style diversity, programming language diversity, want everything to be done Their Way because it’s Just Better and how dare people disagree.
(Python has similar “having your own style is frowned upon” culture problems, I think, but they don’t really do the same “we need to wipe out other programming languages!!” shit.)
So I’m against Rust myself, not for technical reasons, but because of that.
– Frost
Right, I see what you mean. That’s just a weird perspective to have. I know right now Kdenlive is pretty much the only FLOSS video editor, but if there were other comparable ones, imagine if I tore you to pieces over your choice to use the other one? For no reason? Damn.
So, rust can do a lot of the same stuff as C and its various derivatives (further referred to as just C for simplicity here) Increasingly it’s gained prominence doing stuff that used to be only done in C. A lot of the core utilities and Linux kernel are written in C. Now, there has been some folks writing contributions to the Linux kernel in rust, and Ubuntu has done some work to rewrite some of the core utilities in rust.
I’m not privy to the deep lore (mailing list drama) but, my understanding is that there are a lot of people throughly opposed to using rust for important low level stuff in Linux and apparently some people who want to rewrite everything in rust.
I suspect the reality is that… as rust has gained prominence in other areas, some people have developed a lot of experience with it and are more comfortable with it than they are with C. They have thus advocated for using rust to contribute to things. People who are more comfortable with C on the other hand are frustrated when they try to parse a language they’re not as familiar with. And thus, many debates have raged over the qualities of one over the other, and salt has been scattered.
Ahhh okay. I totally get why people are debating this, even if I have no experience in these fields. I was mostly worried there was some crypto/AI bullshit behind the scenes of Rust or some shady funding… idk, something really bad other then an argument getting out of hand.
