This is what most people who complain about Rust rewrites don’t get. It’s not just about memory safety and some new language features. Rust simply did a lot of things right and is nice to work with. New developers actually join Rust projects while old tools written in C struggle to survive.
Yeah, I enjoyed when fish shell did their rewrite and people were arguing whether it makes sense technologically, like it’s a mature codebase, so it’s not likely to reduce the number of bugs and yadda yadda yadda.
None of this mattered, because fish is developed by a group of hobbyists. They didn’t want to continue developing in C++, because it was a pain in the ass. And for sure, one of the reasons they wanted to switch to Rust is because it’s new and exciting.
These reasons are perfectly valid, because they’re volunteers. If they’re not having fun, then they will just stop developing.Yup. I’m an old fart who learned C as my first real language. Rust is just fun.
Look, undeniably some coding languages are miles better than others, but I don’t think any of them would fall under my personal classification of what the word “fun” means…
Fun is when you’re allowed to achieve what you want to achieve with less bullshit to worry about.
Or in more respectable technical terms, when you’re allowed to focus on core logic above everything else.
It was fun when knowing programming was almost a superpower that you had to learn by reading lots of books, etc. Now a computer can do much of the job. The computers are even solving long-open Erdos problems. We’re all just mediocre meatbags.
GKH is to me the second most important guy in the Linux world today next to LT, and he definitely deserves more credit for his efforts maintaining the kernel. Maybe Greg doesn’t get as much press attention because he doesn’t make as profound statments as Linus tends to.
Memory safety is hard to ignore.
Isn’t also half the point behind Rust the ability to evade the GPL and make Linux more vulnerable to takeover by corporate? Last I checked Ubuntu is replacing some GNU stuff like coreutils with Rust.
- Linux kernel code is GPLv2 licensed irrespective of language.
- There are thousands of (A)GPL rust crates/libraries out there.
- The majority of crates are indeed still liberally licensed, but so are most new projects from the last decade, irrespective of the choice of implementation language.
- Rust project rewrites don’t exclusively replace GPL projects, because there aren’t actually that many core GPL software packages to replace. Neither sudo nor zlib are GPL software, just to give two examples. A lot of implemented-in-C core packages in your system right now are actually liberally licensed.
- And just for the sake of accuracy, the supposed threat of liberal vs. copyleft is not about the so called corporate take over or control. It’s about the ability to have proprietary forks/spin-offs. Plenty of GPL projects are corporate-controlled and always have been (see what projects Red Hat maintains).
You should try properly educating yourself on matters, instead of just taking whatever bullshit random often-clueless if not also malicious e-celebs spout at face value, or wherever you’re getting these retarded theories from.
Yes, that’s correct. Whenever you write something in Rust, the license is automatically permissive. In fact, both US and EU copyright law automatically grant an irrevocable, perpetual license to use any and all Rust code that has ever been written for any purpose at all, including for commercial purpose, unless the code was written by a corporation.
Or, you know, you could just:
[package] license = "GPL-3.0-only"To be fair, projects implemented in Rust and adopting the GPL/AGPL are just not that notable.
I mean, you can’t expect people here to have heard of, let’s say, that thing called Lemmy.
Now that would be a horror story. Then again, it’s one of the reasons why I’m asking. Rust fame is just too coincidental with a number of things to not be suspicious. There was a whole thing in C++ (dunno if it’s still ongoing) about the “memory safety” meme, as well.
I feel ya. To me, it’s really sad that some new projects now use licenses that are really good for businesses but do not even protect the projects themselves. I’d rather live in a world where GPL share would increase. (Instead, GPL grows, but its share is diminishing.) All my projects so far are GPL/AGPL.
At the same time, Rust being picked for Linux has really nothing to do with the license. It’s just what you said - a coincidence. The actual choice is made because of the language itself. It’s a great language BTW.
Eh, I’ve heard “foo is a great language” far too many times before, and we always end up seeing the disaster. Sometimes I miss C with POSIX.
Since you seem to be in good faith: no, you’re wrong. Using a language cannot force you into adopting a licence, because automatically everything you produce will be all rights reserved unless otherwise specified. It’s then up to the developer to choose a license.
Rust doesn’t even populate the license metadata in your manifest, it’s up to you.
I think MIT dominance came about thanks to GitHub’s choose a license.
What does this have to do with Linux?
