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
He definitely improved it… but there’s still plenty of material for r/linusrants.
He may not directly call people names anymore but he’s still extremely rude and unprofessional. He would have been fired long ago from any company I work for, and I live in the UK where it’s practically impossible to get fired.
I live in the UK where it’s practically impossible to get fired.
In the UK you only get employment protections after working at a company for two years. Up until then you can be fired without reason
That’s not true. See https://barcankirby.co.uk/two-year-rule-for-employment-rights/
There are dozens of circumstances where an employee can claim automatic unfair dismissal, or where a worker thinks they have been unfairly dismissed or mistreated due to their protected characteristics which could lead to an additional unlawful discrimination claim.
The general fear of litigation means that in practice it is really hard to get rid of underperforming employees in most white collar jobs (once they have passed probation which is normally 3 months). The normal way it happens is they are “managed out”, which is a long and unpleasant process.
It is very much true
From the link you provided:
This may come as a surprise to some: it is only after two years of continued service that employees have the right to request written reasons for their dismissal.
Employers don’t need to provide a reason for your dismissal.
There are some exceptions but they’re very specific and unlikely to relevant. If an employer wants rid of you they can do so at their whim.
Even if you think you have a case, good luck finding a solicitor who will take on your case. They simply won’t be interested because it’s not easy to win without the rights you get after 2 years employment.
Oh I expect absolute crickets from all the people who waded into this trashing Hellwig.
I expect you to have zero kernel commits to your name.
I will show you mine if you show me yours.
Not that number of commits has anything to do with calling out brigading which you still seem to be committed to.
Well, here is a very funny one-off commit, but my biggest effort was probably substantial parts of a couple AMD/ATI GPU drivers, well-summarized here. As usual, that was a team effort, with particular credit to Deucher (AMD), Glisse (
radeonmaintainer), and Airlie (DRM/DRI maintainer). So, put up or shut up. Or, to paraphrase the sentiment that you seem to not grok: talk is cheap; show us your code.Let me make it clear. I call out brigading because it is useless noise that distorts and obfuscates the kernel development process. I don’t care that you’re salty that I’m pointing out that your “absolute crickets” comment is not only incorrect, but empty in the sense that your lack of perception is not a substitute for the actual process of kernel development. Additionally, in this case, it seems like you’re still focused on personalities rather than the underlying computer science; I expect “absolute crickets” when asking you about the topic of memory safety.
My commits have my real name, because I do serious work, and no I won’t be doxxing myself on this account.
I call out brigading
What kind of lazy gaslighting is this? You were part of the brigade. You have literally been participating in the kind of behaviour that Linus has correctly called out as unhelpful.
Please continue to think you’re on the right side of this discussion when the guy you went out to bat for has stepped down as a maintainer and deleted his socials over this.
deleted by creator
What’s with the quotes?
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.
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.
I would’t trade a good horse for an early car. Maybe a model T.
The horse-car analogies rarely achieve what you want them to, especially in situations where we don’t have the benefit of hindsight.
