Linus Torvalds: "If you don’t want to deal with Rust, you get no say on it"

by etra0on 2/21/25, 1:45 AMwith 13 comments
by etra0on 2/21/25, 2:12 AM

I'm glad Linus didn't miss that the change was just a user of the DMA code and didn't involve any changes to DMA itself. I think that very important point was overlooked in many of the responses in the original thread.

by tiffanyhon 2/21/25, 4:48 AM

This title is misleading which is why Linus wrote his note.

A better title would be “Linus clarifies that maintainers can’t dictate who or what (like Rust) use their code.”

—-

Key quote:

  So let me be very clear: if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG.
  …
  So this email is not about some "Rust policy". This email is about a much bigger issue: as a maintainer you are in charge of your code, sure - but you are not in charge of who uses the end result and how.

by NavinFon 2/23/25, 9:00 PM

>You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I want to have nothing to do with Rust", and then in the very next sentence say "And that means that the Rust code that I will ignore cannot use the C interfaces I maintain"

Seems fair to me. I wish the title replaced "you get no say on it" with "you get no say on rust bindings"

by zahlmanon 2/21/25, 3:31 AM

The other title (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123133) seems better to me even if this version is currently more popular.

by gigel82on 2/21/25, 4:13 AM

The title is "bombastic"; yes, a slight edit, but one that changes the meaning, especially taken out of context. What he said was that if a maintainer doesn't want to deal with Rust they don't have to deal with Rust but they also don't get to tell users of the code they maintain how (or whether) to use Rust.

> If you don't want to deal with the Rust code, you get no say on the Rust code.

FWIW, I think C++ would be much better suited for the Linux Kernel than Rust, and so much easier for C developers to adopt.