zlacker

It might be difficult to back out kernel changes versus userspace changes. App-level concerns with leaky abstractions could follow functional programming, immutable state, fail-fast, and all sorts of gospel--but there's still a kernel doing stuff behind the scenes.

If the kernel acquiesces to certain philosophies that are opposite to its intent as-a-kernel for many other environments and contexts it must support, a cascade of later patches could derail things completely. It may become too much effort to undo, and the project must limp along--until that mountain of tech debt costs too much to fix.

Maybe the kernel cannot fail fast for good reasons. And the Linux project cannot fail fast for equally good reasons.

And possibly, if a technically compelling reason presents itself, Linus may fully back it--even contributing to that work himself.