This makes me sad because I assume Hector is deeply demoralized. I’ve seen him as a hero since he started the Asahi project. I know nothing about him other than working on Asahi, Asahi worked when I installed it last year, and this blow-up last week or so and now. Maybe he’s a terrible person. I just see his technical work (and all the other devs contributing to the project) and I know this would make me lose steam if I were in his shoes.
Martin was out of line.
Hellwig also was out of line and unnecessarily hostile.
Linus… Is the voice of reason? Though I would have preferred he rebuke Hellwig in the same breath.
It’s a strange 2025.
Martin has nearly always been like this. Ive known martin from way way way back when he worked on the wii and he has always been a guy that just causes drama by pointing and saying “this is shit. Look at this shit”. It isnt a bad thing to do, but the way he does it is basically going to somebody’s home with a sledgehammer and smashing a wall without checking in. It turns people away from you even if youre right.
He had a beef and drama with me, devkitpro, gbatemp.
Then he stopped being on my radar, heard he was working on asahi, then heard he was causing drama between emulation devs, then luois rossman, and now bloody linus torvalds?sigh
pointing and saying “this is shit. Look at this shit”
Yeah you only get to do that if you’re Linus 😄
You only get to do that if you’re the founder and leader of a project. If you join other people’s projects then you play by their rules, not your own.
Linus stepped away from the spotlight and apologized and went to therapy and changed his behavior
Amazingly restrained on Linus’ part. He has really grown.
Well, social media around him and us really hasn’t. Torvalds is right to condemn the agitation, but Martin’s case is just by-catch to the underlying technopolitical issue.
What’s with the quotes?
Claburn’s article seems biased toward Martin’s position in the disagreement, using the most forgiving language possible for his behavior while describing the opposing side with obviously critical language and insufficiently covering the reasons for it. Linus’s response might be mildly interesting, but the article is disappointingly poor journalism.
No amount of sabotage from old entrenched maintainers is going to stop the world from moving forward towards memory-safe languages.
Jesus fucking insufferable Christ… Saying shit like this, given C has been in use for 50 years and is still in very wide use today, and given the vast number of languages that have come and gone over this period, it’s just incredible.
I do not agree with the Dev who stepped down.
But on the topic of C, I wouldn’t measure the quality of a language based on its adoption. C is a relatively old language and therefore benefits from getting wide-use before other languages were born. It will never die because who would ever want to rewrite every project in existence in another language.
Memory safety is very important since it has consistently been one of the largest sources of vulnerabilities throughout software history.
C is not a bad language, but it has flaws. Performance at the cost of safety is not a good trade-off in most scenarios. There is no such thing as a “perfect programmer” who won’t make mistakes.
Memory safety at the expense of complicated interfaces is also not a good trade-off, even in terms of security.
I don’t disagree with these points in general. However this isn’t simply about the tools. Tools go along with people and their skill and experience. There are developers and developers. There are people with lots of experience who create much higher quality C code than others. Personally I’d never touch C if I can avoid it as I don’t trust myself as much. I’d always go for C++ instead. Modern C++ with RAII is great. It’s what most of the software at our corpo is written in. Maybe Rust would end up becoming the default standard at some point. Maybe something else would. I would never go shit on a coworker who has produced tons of well functioning code that they better reskill in something that may or may not stick around, or that they may not become as productive with for a long time. A team skilled in C or C++ may be able to produce higher quality software, quicker than a less skilled team Rust. Rust might be better for teams that just start in native programming. I don’t know. If it grows enough in use, reskilling people and reworking software to cooperate with it might become an obvious choice. For now, as I see it, it depends on the team.
And I dont deny that. There are a lot of programmers, and not all had eduction on designing secure software. Even with the knowledge and experience, what if the programmer is tired or makes a similar mistake. Only one mess-up away from a potential vulnerability or instability of the app and system as a whole. I need more experience with C to form a better opinion.
This is why security is usually multi-layered - decrease the chances of a single fuckup compromising everything. And yes using a safer language adds a layer. But typically it won’t be the only layer.
Probably what all the horse people said when cars were invented.
The horse-car analogies rarely achieve what you want them to, especially in situations where we don’t have the benefit of hindsight.
I would’t trade a good horse for an early car. Maybe a model T.
More akin to Elon insisting the cybertruck is the way of the future, and people just keep buying Rivians and internal combustion vehicles.
Especially as there’s D, a language that when used in betterC mode, is on-par with C, minus the archaic precompiler, which is replaced with very powerful metaprogramming capabilities.
D didn’t catch on for many good reasons… And it never will. Zig has way more momentum (and it better!) as a “better C”, and obviously the main draw of Rust is memory safety without GC which D doesn’t have.
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Oh I expect absolute crickets from all the people who waded into this trashing Hellwig.
