[gritzko]

From the minutes I conclude that Rust-in-the-kernel looks like an additional complexity tax. I mean, if you write an OS from scratch, you can use the full power of your language. Plastering it to the side of an already vast codebase creates additional issues, as we see here.

[mnau]

> additional complexity tax

Yes, but that should be offsetted by easier driver development. See the blog about Rust GPU driver for asahii linux, done in one month. EDIT: Google "tales of the m1 gpu" (author has a very negative opinions about hacker news, read if you like by clicking the link https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/)

Is it universal? We'll see in coming years.

[KallDrexx]

Maybe I'm reading something wrong but the discussion this HN posting is about sounds very much about trying to make a Linux subsystem and API in Rust, so that Rust's type system can enforce conformance to safety mechanisms via its abstraction.

That's fundamentally different and harder than a driver being written in rust that uses the Linux's subsystems C APIs.

I can see a lot of drivers taking on the complexity tax of being written in Rust easily. The complexity tax on writing a whole subsystem in Rust seems like an exponentially harder problem.

[wongarsu]

You could just write rust code that calls the C APIs, and that would probably avoid a lot of discussions like the one in the article.

But making good wrappers would make development of downstream components even easier. As the opponents in the discussion said: there's about 50 filesystem drivers. If you make the interface better that's a boon for every file system (well, every file system that uses rust, but it doesn't take many to make the effort pay off). You pay the complexity tax once for the interface, and get complexity benefits in every component that uses the interface.

We would have the same discussions about better C APIs, if only C was expressive enough to allow good abstractions.

[nicce]

> author has a very negative opinions about hacker news

I am not sure if author (Asahi Lina) has, but the project lead Hector Martin definitely has.

[kweefee]

Same person.

[nicce]

Just speculation.

[josephcsible]

Warning: Don't click that link. Copy and paste the URL instead. That site serves only verbal abuse and harassment to people that it detects are HN users.

[eru]

Alas, that link just gets you a rant about politics, if you click on it directly.

Copy-and-pasting works.

[olivermuty]

"Rant about politics", haha. Or as other people like to call it: "A real concern described in an apt manner".

I have observed these inflammatory sub-graphs of comments myself and have thought to myself that this must be a huge growing grounds for unmoderated and unwanted behaviour because it more or less becomes invisible once flagged enough.

[erdii]

In this specific case complaining about "politics" gets the sour by-taste of enabling (or at least not condoning) harrasment to the point of single folks taking their own lifes over it.

Why?! Even if you're not sure what to think about the queer movement; even if you have already made up your mind about the queer movement and oppose their ideas or some of them; I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

hastily jotted rant for the folks who'd like to complain about "politics" from creeping into every discussion everywhere:

It's really sad to see so many folks disconnecting and immediately dismissing whole groups of other folks as soon as they start complaining about an issue they have because of "politics". :(

I get that you don't want to get involved in shit flinging shows and that its tedious to figure out who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Especially because there are never clear answers. If you feel like this and then proceed to complain about 'politics' creeping everywhere, please beware of this:

Pretending to be apolitical doesn't work most of the time, as politics is basically another word for "acting (or deliberately not-acting) in some kind of public sphere" which you all do, and when the "policitics" have arrived at a topic, then they'll stay there at least in that specific case you are witnessing! You just are part of a hyperconnected and confusing world with a lot of conflict, wether you like it or not.

Pretending to be apolitical also serves the upholding of whatever status quo is currently in place because anything that has even a slight chance of changing anything is inherently a political topic.

Please don't turn your heads on "political" topics or, at least, don't complain about it in that way as it mostly enables unjust behaviour to continue. It doesn't even matter if it's the person who brought up the "political" stuff who is acting unjust or the folks they're complaining about). In both cases it's probably better to either avoid commenting at all or to convey your critical thoughts to that "political" conversation.

[pjc50]

> I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

There are plenty of people who do want the freedom to say exactly what they choose, including a lengthy period of directed harassment, and shrug their shoulders if someone commits suicide over it. There's not much that can be done other than ban them from civilized spaces.

[pessimizer]

"Bullying" is a judgement. Intrinsic to the word is a judgement that what is being done is bad, and the person doing it would not describe it that way.

And by that I don't mean that it's not bad to bully people (it's rather tautological), I mean that talk of bullying often begs the question, and is intentionally done in order to elide past the actual events that occurred. Lèse majesté laws against talking about the King, elected officials, or even cops or bureaucrats now get justified as anti-bullying.

I missed any rant about politics in the blog however. But this thread has a smell of "my politics aren't political because they are true, and your politics are political because they are lies."

[logicprog]

I'm glad at least some other people on this horrible site feel this way.

[im3w1l]

To me, you have to distinguish between harassment directed at a person, and on the other hand discussion about a person.

It is not possible to use hacker news to send messages to someones email. It is not even possible to send a dm to another hacker news user. You could potentially imagine hacker news being used to organize harassment of someone, but I have never seen either accusations or evidence of such a thing.

So then we have established, that since harassment directed at them is impossible, the issue they have is that people on hacker news write bad things about them.

Next, those things seem to often be flagged or downvoted, reducing exposure. But that is apparently not enough, because they can be found on google. So here we arrive at the core issue. There is content on Google about this person, that they would rather not be on Google. This is the complaint. So this person is basically saying that if there is unfavorable coverage of them findable on google, that is harassment, and it needs to go. If it isn't purged it's bullying that could lead to suicide.

This is a very ambitious "landgrab" if you will, and it starts to seriously infringe on other peoples rights.

It's similar in that manner to other things like "stop terrorism" or "think of the children". Yes clearly harassment is bad, and terrorism is bad, and pedophiles are no good. But we can't completely give up on our freedoms because of that.

[lelanthran]

> Or as other people like to call it: "A real concern described in an apt manner".

Oh please. Every activist for every marginal issue says the same thing. Doesn't make it true.

[aniviacat]

I can't find a rant in the link. Was the link changed or did I overlook something?

[jeroenhd]

The author of the website details their issue with the way HN does moderation (which I can't say I disagree with, especially after HN intentionally disabled referrer headers for websites that take issue with HN). This only shows up if HN is in the referer URL.

I wouldn't call it a rant, but rather a polite request for HN policy to change.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I wouldn't call it a rant, but rather a polite request for HN policy to change.

Which is made by blocking people with no ability to do anything about it.

[mcronce]

What? All you need to do is resubmit the request without a Referer header. For me, using Firefox, this meant clicking in the address bar, changing nothing, and hitting enter.

That's hardly "no ability to do anything about it".

[Phelinofist]

Also didn't show for me with disabled JS

[amiga386]

If you click the link - any link to asahilinux.org from HN - it should start "Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News.", followed Hector Martin ranting that he isn't in charge of the moderation policy of HN.

The response given in Arkell v. Pressdram is appropriate.

[Already__Taken]

reads a lot like letting perfect be the enemy of good.

[thesnide]

While I agree there are benefits to rust, I tend to think all reason cannot fight hype.

The tax will be seen as a necessity to embrace future and progress.

I'm wondering why do not restrict ourselves to a safe subset instead of jumping into a huge bandwagon of unknown bugs and tradeoffs

[pjc50]

There is no "safe subset" of C. MISRA is fairly close, but all sorts of things that you might need, like integer arithmetic, have potential UB in C.

(The best current effort is https://sel4.systems/ , which is written in C but has a large proof of safety attached. The language design question is basically: should the proof be part of the language?)

[regularfry]

Given that undefined behaviour just means "undefined by the standard", do you get usefully closer to being able to identify a safe subset with the (MISRA/alternative, specific compiler, specific architecture) triple?

[pjc50]

No, undefined behavior does not mean "not defined by the standard", it means those places where the standard says "undefined behavior". And then the long and complicated war over "the compiler may assume that UB does not happen and then optimize on that basis".

You might be able to tighten it up in some specific cases, and those battles are being fought elsewhere, but there's stuff like lock lifetimes which you cannot do without substantial extra annotations inside or outside the language.

[regularfry]

Sorry, yes - poor wording on my part.

[PhilipRoman]

I found frama-c to be pretty good, including all the integer quirks

[Yoric]

Safe subset of what?

[germandiago]

I like Linus view on evolution. Evolution will tell what the most sensible choices are over time. It is like "the market" in some way. Let everyone make their bets, wait, see, analyze, research. That's it.

[vollbrecht]

One can argue that any additional code is introducing complexity, not only writing Rust. Does that mean we should just stop innovating and go into an indefinite state of maintenance, since we are already so vast?

A tax in one place may not be a net negative, if it's used like in the real world to offset other problems. And just saying it will not offset any problems because of a single discussion, that does not have a definite conclusion, comes of as a short argument.

[another2another]

>Does that mean we should just stop innovating and go into an indefinite state of maintenance

If you mean that not using Rust (or maybe some other languages e.g. Zig or Ada?) means that there can be no innovation in the Linux kernel, I would have to disagree since there's been plenty of progress in plain old c (see for instance io_uring), not to mention the fact that the c language itself could change to make developer ergonomics better - since that seems to be the nub of the problem.

It also raises the question of what happens in the future when Rust is no longer the language du jour - how do we know it's going to last the course? And now there's 2 different codebases, potentially maintained by 2 different diminishing sets of active maintainers.

[vollbrecht]

> If you mean that not using Rust (or maybe some other languages e.g. Zig or Ada?) means that there can be no innovation in the Linux kernel, I would have to disagree since there's been plenty of progress in plain old c.

No i didn't mean that. If i understand OP correctly here, he argued that it is a tax to use rust, a tax is always bad, and thous should be avoided.

We obviously can't now the future. We also can't now how future maintainers look like, and if there will be a bigger abundance of people understanding kernel level C or kernel level Rust or both.

I also don't think that any one developer can claim to fully get every part of the Linux Kernel. So if one person want's to work on a particular subsection they need to make themself familiar with it, independent of the language used. And then we are back at the argument, is the additional tax bad, or what does it bring to the table.

[riku_iki]

> One can argue that any additional code is introducing complexity

additional code can replace more complex existing or future code, thus can reduce complexity