Wedson Almeida Filho is a Microsoft engineer who has been prolific in his contributions to the Rust for the Linux kernel code over the past several years. Wedson has worked on many Rust Linux kernel features and even did a experimental EXT2 file-system driver port to Rust. But he’s had enough and is now stepping away from the Rust for Linux efforts.

From Wedon’s post on the kernel mailing list:

I am retiring from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it’s best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.

…

I truly believe the future of kernels is with memory-safe languages. I am no visionary but if Linux doesn’t internalize this, I’m afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix.

Lastly, I’ll leave a small, 3min 30s, sample for context here: https://youtu.be/WiPp9YEBV0Q?t=1529 – and to reiterate, no one is trying force anyone else to learn Rust nor prevent refactorings of C code."

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
    692·
    2 months ago

    Ted Ts’o is a prick with a god complex. I understand his experience is hard to match, we all have something in our lives we’re that good at, but that does not need to lead to acting like a fucking religious fanatic.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
      823·
      2 months ago

      I understand his experience is hard to match, we all have something in our lives we’re that good at

      At some point, that mix of experience and ego becomes a significant liability. He’s directly hurting the adoption of Rust in the kernel, while the C code he’s responsible for is full of problems that would have been impossible if written in safe Rust.

      CVE-2024-42304 — crash from undocumented function parameter invariants
      CVE-2024-40955 — out of bounds read
      CVE-2024-0775 — use-after-free
      CVE-2023-2513 — use-after-free
      CVE-2023-1252 — use-after-free
      CVE-2022-1184 — use-after-free
      CVE-2020-14314 — out of bounds read
      CVE-2019-19447 — use-after-free
      CVE-2018-10879 — use-after-free
      CVE-2018-10878 — out of bounds write
      CVE-2018-10881 — out of bounds read
      CVE-2015-8324 — null pointer dereference
      CVE-2014-8086 — race condition
      CVE-2011-2493 — call function pointer in uninitialized struct
      CVE-2009-0748 — null pointer dereference

    • IAmNotACat@lemmy.world
      222·
      2 months ago

      Agreed. His experience might be useful if he were there to engage, but he’s clearly not. It seems like he just wanted to shout down the project and it seems like he was somewhat successful.

    • qqq@lemmy.world
      228·
      2 months ago

      No intention of validating that behavior, it’s uncalled for and childish, but I think there is another bit of “nontechnical nonsense” on the opposite side of this silly religious war: the RIIR crowd. Longstanding C projects (sometimes even projects written in dynamic languages…?) get people that know very little about the project, or at least have never contributed, asking for it to be rewritten or refactored in Rust, and that’s likely just as tiring as the defensive C people when you want to include Rust in the kernel.

      People need to chill out on both sides of this weird religious war. A programming language is just a tool: its merits in a given situation should be discussed logically.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        I imagine this mentality is frustrating because of how many times they have to explain that they weren’t forcing people to learn Rust and that the Rust bindings were second class citizens. They never said to rewrite the kernel in Rust.