Linux

As someone who is more of a casual user, I don't have a problem with Rust itself, but rather Cargo and pulling a bunch of dependencies from god-knows-where, it scares me. It just feels like npm 2.0, with all of it's issues included.

Old people defending status quo.

From the perspective of somebody who's actually hacked on Linux: Most Linux maintainers, like most programmers in general, are full of machismo stemming from the inherent difficulty of writing C. It is extremely difficult to write correct C and nobody can do it consistently, so those maintainers are heavily invested in the perception that they are skilled with C. Rust is much easier to write and democratizes kernel hacking, which is uncomfortable for older maintainers due to the standard teenagers-vs-parents social dynamics. Worse, adapting various kernel interfaces so that they are Rust-friendly has revealed that the pre- and postconditions of interface methods were not known before; there is existing sloppiness in the kernel's internals which is only visible because of Rust-related cleanups.

Note that Linux is not a GNU project. GNU's kernel project is GNU Herd. "GNU/Linux" refers to Linux userlands populated with GNU packages. It's important not to be distracted by this; the kernel is agnostic towards userland and generally is compatible with any loadable executable that uses Linux's public syscall interface, so the entire discussion of Rust in the kernel is separate from anything going on in userland.

Most siblings are wrong! PRs written in Rust can be rejected. There are already multiple non-C languages in the kernel. Rust is sufficiently available on the platforms where it will be required for building kernel. Maintainers are only added after they have shown themselves to be socially reliable and they can be removed by other maintainers if they are unresponsive. The only correct sibling points out that Rust is different.

Most common reason I saw was not wanting mixed languages across the code base.

If you're a Rust maintainer and you're given a C patch (or reverse) then what do you do with it/confirm it's not bringing other bugs.

Other issues are that it's heavier, hurts compatibility, and doesn't function like C.

The main real argument is that if new contributors write code and then leave for other projects then old contributors still have to maintain that code, a task that gets really hard when code is written in a different paradigm entirely.

From what I have ready the issue is as follows:

Rust is a memory safe language, because of this Rust enthusiast have been pushing for it. Not a problem there.

The issue is that some have taken it to an extreme, evangelical level where they expect name dropping Rust should open every door and blindly accept every PR

In reality, Rust rewrites can (and have) introduced bugs because you can make shitty code even with the best languages out there

Huge toolchain needed and limited compatibility to other platforms.

The entire controversy is that its different.

One big practical criticism is that it requires a different compiler which is supported on far fewer platforms than GCC

What's the advantage of GPL? As far as I'm aware MIT and Apache are both FOSS. But I'm new to this and still learning.

I don't know what the big deal about Rust is. It seems like a cool language to me...