Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 9:45 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
Parent article: Merging bcachefs

>Rust is something that he has been evangelizing about to "anyone who will listen"

I'd wish developers would spend less on (fanatically) evangelizing the toolchains used, and rather push a project on own merit (e.g. features).

Just because you made a painting with a $10k horsehair brush and golden paint does not necessarily make it great art.

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Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 11:15 UTC (Sat) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

I'd think that sword ought to cut both ways.

If the brush does not matter, and the art is not to your liking, then criticize the art. If the brush doesn't make it good, then the brush also doesn't make it bad.

No one's saying it's good because of the new lang. Symmetrically, new lang evangelism oughtn't be a reason to dismiss it.
There's an entire new filesystem's worth of artwork to critize on its own merit here, if you please

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 14:20 UTC (Sat) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link] (4 responses)

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that tools are just fads, or something of no consequence.

A good craftsman cares about his tools. Listen to woodworkers who get together, they'll be talking about their tools just as much as the actual work. We're interacting with these tools every day, and the quality of the tool very much affects the quality of the work.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 14:25 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (3 responses)

Even a pencil gets a good artist a long way, that's my point.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sat) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link]

Conferences are for programmers to talk to other programmers. I don't think you have a point.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 17, 2023 20:48 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Ooh, a tortured analogy. Let's flog it to death and put it out of its misery.

A crayon scribble may satisfy a lot of people, but the rest of us don't really accept that VFAT and NTFS written in a pre-C99 toolchain are the limit of what's possible.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 18, 2023 1:42 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

But artists don't generally do final drafts in pencil, and if you take a Star Wars, or a Toy Story, there's thousands of artists working with the best equipment that can be found to produce the final result.

And Linux is more like engineering than art. The Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City had the most elegant walkways, until they collapsed and killed 114. Sometimes it matters how you do things, and handwaves at artistry isn't going to recover the lost data.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 18, 2023 3:48 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

As the article says, bcachefs is not currently written in rust, apart from a few userspace tools. It would be a 10 year project to rewrite it in rust. He is pushing it on his merits not on the language.