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by zozbot234 1458 days ago
> It was kind of funny watching Linus Torvalds explode at people for these things back in the day, but in hindsight I'm very glad he took some time off to become a more emotionally and socially mature person for the good of the project.

It's ironic that you say this while complaining about bad attitudes in the OpenBSD community. When it comes to obnoxious attitudes, Linus Torvalds is a nobody compared to Theo de Raadt. BTW, Linus is now pushing for gradual adoption of Rust in the kernel, which would turn many issues of "writing code that doesn't crash" (though not all) into things that a compiler can check for you. That community is generally pretty relaxed and cooperative towards newcomers, due to a shared understanding that there's no point getting angry about code that won't even pass that check.

1 comments

I haven't seen that out of Theo for a really long time, either. Most OpenBSD dev these days has seemed to move on from the beer hackathons and into academic/corporate dev for sure. It's all growing up. Most of my reference is relevant to +10 years ago. I like the OpenBSD scene these days a lot actually, there's a ton to learn from them. They are a lot more of a nice community than their old legacy might have you believing.

I like the Redox crowd and other people who are trying their hand at pure rust kernel+userland as well, they are doing some very interesting things that probably should have been done a long time ago - it's just not exactly easy to move on from C/C++ heterodoxy when it's such a complex thing to even fathom entirely replacing. Like when your whole kernel is in a different ABI you need to replace the whole userland, too... Not exactly small potatoes. Very admirable to just go ahead and do it.