The Rust for Linux project [LWN.net]

The Rust for Linux project

Posted Sep 29, 2021 10:20 UTC (Wed) by lacos (guest, #70616)
In reply to: The Rust for Linux project by roc
Parent article: The Rust for Linux project

> Is it a principle of Linux development that "kernel maintainers shall not be required to learn anything new"?

In any busy project, maintainers tend to operate at 100+% of their capacity. Whenever they need to learn something new, that effort is taken away from their "usual" activities (which are possibly the activities that they get paid for). Obviously they keep learning new things incrementally, but new material that's intrusive and has a steep learning curve (= late RoI) must be a different sell.

> I guess the problem is that those changes have been incremental but "learn Rust" is not.

IMO: exactly so.

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The Rust for Linux project

Posted Sep 29, 2021 11:22 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

As someone who's currently being paid to "learn something new", it's painful!

I'm now working with Oracle rather than Pick, so switching from ENGLISH to SQL is horrible. SQL is just so much more convoluted, slow, horrendous ... (and I've just managed to speed up a query from 10 mins to 2, just by thinking hard about how it was written. The Pick version would probably have taken one minute as the first draft!).

Then there's learning VBA. Okay, I know assorted programming languages so this isn't so bad ...

But it gets wearing when pretty much everything you want to do results in a google query for "what's the syntax for doing XYZ?". And working remotely, I can't even easily ask my co-workers ...

Cheers,
Wol

The Rust for Linux project

Posted Oct 1, 2021 20:27 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

In any busy project, maintainers tend to operate at 100+% of their capacity. Whenever they need to learn something new, that effort is taken away from their "usual" activities (which are possibly the activities that they get paid for).

Compared to the stuff I'm usually fighting to swap in (how does the dcache work again?), I feel like a new language isn't too bad. They're well-documented. They usually share a lot with other languages. The basics you need to get started usually just aren't that complicated.

The Rust for Linux project

Posted Oct 2, 2021 21:40 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> In any busy project, maintainers tend to operate at 100+% of their capacity.

Then they need to delegate. Or abdicate.
Such behaviour is not good for the mental health of the maintainer or the long term health of the project. Just don't do it.
If you stop, that creates a vacuum. Vacuums tend to get filled.