It’s not in C, if that’s what you mean.

It’s a “stream manipulator” function that not only generates a new line, it also flushes the stream.

None of the features discussed are aesthetic only.

Nope. It links to an explanation of what that poster is:

This is the UNIX Magic Poster, originally created by Gary Overacre in the mid-1980s and published by UniTech Software.

Probably moreso for expressing the opinion so strongly without actually knowing any of the three languages.

Edit: I’m just guessing why a different comment got downvotes. Why am I getting downvotes?

Doesn’t the first edition use K&R style parameter lists and other no-longer-correct syntax?

I think generally C compilers prefer to keep the stack intact for debugging and such.

Okay, yeah, I was indeed reading your original reply as a criticism of one of the people involved (presumably the security researcher), rather than as a criticism of the post title. Sorry for misunderstanding.

Apparently GCC does indeed do tail-call optimization at -O2: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-foptimize-sibling-calls

But in that case, I’m not sure why the solution to the denial of service vulnerability isn’t just “compile with -foptimize-sibling-calls.”

…what is your point? Some software (in a language that doesn’t have tail-recursion optimization) used recursion to handle user-provided input, and indeed it broke. Someone wrote to explain that that’s a potential vulnerability, the author agreed, and fixed it. Who here is misunderstanding how computers implement recursion?

“don’t quote the shouty bit; it’s not all shouty”

Marcan pretty clearly isn’t saying that feature requests wore him down. He’s saying that people saying “what you’ve built so far isn’t useful” wore him down.

(Plus, your original analogy about parents and children is completely lost by now.)

Not sure if this was intended as a response to me?

Presumably by people like Marcan working to make it happen, rather than by random people complaining it’s not already done.

The bit you quoted from the post explicitly said “most x86 laptops”, not “all”.

That one actually seems plausible, if he ever learns about that whole thing

I wrote a longer reply with links, but somehow it didn’t actually post; so this will be shorter and unsourced. Sorry about that.

There already was a discussion, over the course of several years, about whether to add Rust to the kernel. Linus merged rust/kernel into the mainline in 2022, and it was released in Linux 6.1. The patch that Hellwig opposed did not introduce Rust, it just added more Rust.

Hellwig also made it pretty clear that he wasn’t open to discussion. If you read the thread, there were numerous attempts to “talk things over.”

You may be right that Marcan’s posts on Mastodon added nothing productive, though I honestly think there’s some value in sharing behavior like Hellwig’s with the broader programming community. But his posts in the actual mailing list seem pretty sensible, albeit provocatively worded.

Also, in case you didn’t know, similar behavior (to Hellwig’s) led the primary Rust for Linux maintainer, Wedson Almeida Filho, to step down back in August. Marcan is correct that the anti-R4L maintainers are successfully demoralizing the R4L people.

it’s old man screaming at cloud

Not exactly – part of the point of that idiom is that the old man is powerless, and the cloud ignores him. But Hellwig is using his authority as a maintainer to make things more difficult for R4L with his “explicit NACK”.

this drama Martin is doing in social media is pretty much pointless.

Well, maybe, and if you haven’t seen it already, Linus chastised him for that. Several people have spoken up to say that Martin has done this sort of thing before.

But on the other hand, arguably it is important for people who don’t read the Linux kernel mailing list to hear when things like this happen; and if Martin hadn’t posted about it, how would we have known about it? Would The Register have written the summary that they did?

Martin isn’t even relevant! He’s just for the popcorn, like the rest of us! Free kernel development popcorn!

I’m not sure why he phrased things that way, because he was a maintainer of ARM/APPLE, which relies on R4L, until he decided to step down following Linus’s reprimand. So no, he wasn’t just an outside observer.

…do those changes proposed by the project affect the stable branch now?

Not sure which changes you mean, exactly, but the rust/kernel folder in the patch set does indeed already exist in the stable branch.

Eh, he also said “While not my favourite language it’s definitively one of the best new ones and I encourage people to use it for new projects where it fits.”

But…that’s exactly what’s happening. Rust is already in the kernel, with both Linus’s and GKH’s approval. CH is trying to singlehandedly reject any use of Rust in any part of the kernel where he has maintainer status. That’s pretty specific to R4L.

Christoph Hellwig isn’t criticizing Rust the language, and Hector Martin isn’t claiming that he is. This is about a project, Rust for Linux, that has been endorsed by both Linus and GKH, and one maintainer personally attempting to stop it from moving forward.