I thought that he had apologised and regretted being hostile in comments. Apparently not. Not that I have much of an issue with ranty colorful language, but you need to also be right and have a legitimate cause to pull it off...
The point he makes is BS. "the reality is that there are no absolute guarantees. Ever" Yeah, DUH! The compiler could have bugs and soundness issues for example.
The point is you don't need "absolute guarantees" just "way safer and which dozens more classes of issues discovered automatically" is already enough. The other guy didn't write about "absolute guarantees". He said "WE'RE TRYING to guarantee the absence of undefined behaviour". That's an aim, not a claim they've either achieved it, or they can achieve it 100%
>Even "safe" rust code in user space will do things like panic when things go wrong (overflows, allocation failures, etc). If you don't realize that that is NOT some kind of true safely, I don't know what to say.
Well, if Linus doesn't realize this is irrelevant to the argument the parent made and the intention he talked about, I don't know what to say...
Other software dictators do exactly the same, but in a more underhanded and bureaucratic manner, which is worse. Yet their disciples call them "benevolent".
I can deal with Linus, but not with the latter. Linus strikes me as not being really serious or vindictive. It's just a colorful way of expressing himself.
Bordering the hypocritical... And I got the impression you missed his point as well.
In today's news "random angry guy on the Internet tells Linus Torvalds to go back to kindergarten, because reasons"
You calling his point BS, but also strongly agreeing with it.
I guess you find it too obvious. But while it's obvious to many, there seem to be many who do not understand it. Issues involving rust often get derailed to pointlessness when rust's safety guarantees are treated as an absolute.
I'm only agreeing with the fact that there are no absolute guarantees. Not that his use of the fact in the point he makes has any relevance...
If somebody had said "The earth is round, therefore we should not care about getting lost and GPS, because you always can always keep going and end up where you started on a sphere anyway", then I would have also "stongly agreed" to the first factoid, but think the overall point BS.
Only if one can't separate a trivial factoid being used in an argument with the quality of the argument itself and the point being made...
You, know, you can agree that "there are no absolute guarantees" while still considering it a BS argument to use this fact to support that having the (non-absolute) guarantees Rust does give is in any way less useful...
You can also disagree that "there are no absolute guarantees", while true, has any place to be used in an argument against the use of safer compilers...
That's of: "There are no absolute guarantees against dying from a crash, and safety belts don't give you any, so let's not use safety belts either" quality
How is a "guarantee" not claiming something is 100% ?
Why people feel attacked by Linus words is a mystery to me.
And the *reality* is that there are no absolute guarantees. Ever. The "Rust is safe" is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety. Never has been. Anybody who believes that should probably re-take their kindergarten year, and stop believing in the Easter bunny and Santa Claus.
Accepting the idea that rust guarantees aren't necessarily always good is needed to accept the idea that those guarantees might need to be relaxed, or at least don't necessarily justify linux kernel changes.
The idea that rust guarantees aren't necessarily always good is completely orthogonal to a condescending diatribe about how "there are no absolute guarantees", and totally needlessly connected to "go back to kindergarten" and "stop believing in Santa" BS.
"I guarantee I will be there" - but I could always be hit by a bus, or have a very serious family issue to tend to, or an earthquake might happen, or the airports might be closed due to Covid and so on.
"Our bank guarantees your money" - yeah, except if the global economy collapses, or the country is hit by an asteroid, or if there's martial law, and so on.
The trivial such cases are irrelevant to the guarantees they want to offer (and same for Rust), and it's a bad move to point to them and consider them as part of his argument.
Not to mention they're saying "trying to", not guaranteeing in the first place. Which acknowledges things like possible bugs, or some edge case not handled, etc.