[0xcde4c3db]

> The amount of bad-faith argumentation happening is really discouraging about the state of Linux development.

I don't think most of it is bad-faith argumentation so much as a failure to assume good faith. This is mostly conjecture on my part (I've only read a small percentage of the LKML and Mastodon threads about this stuff), but I think the idea is pretty straightforward:

Rust trains developers to think about lifetimes, locks, race conditions etc. in pretty specific ways, learn the language of borrow checker errors, and so on. People who haven't written a lot of both Rust and C simply won't have the particular mindset and skill set to look at any given "Rust problem" and understand how it could map to a shortcoming in the C code it's wrapping. So when a Rust developer is trying to wrap a C API and discovers an issue, I think the C-only developer taking the report/patch is primed to see not an indication of a legitimate bug, but rather an attempt to force C code to conform to Rust semantics, for the sake of simplifying the Rust developer's job. The Rust developer tries to explain, but this comes across as an irrelevant appeal to some obscure theoretical concern. At this point, further objections are obviously just the Rust developer being lazy, stubborn, doctrinaire, and otherwise not cut out for kernel development. Something like this probably only needs to happen a handful of times to mutate into a fairly durable meme of "Jesus fucking Christ, these Rust evangelists are exhausting. What the fuck is wrong with them?".