New Rust, Old Drama

I don’t expect folks here to read the phrase, “there was a big debate about the Rust programming language on a mailing list,” and not have their eyes glaze over.

But the truth is, the programming languages we use matter, and they may say more about us than we let on. Because that debate about Rust ultimately led to a prominent open-source coder hanging up his programmer’s hat.

Hector Martin, also known as marcan, announced this week he was departing from the Asahi Linux project, an initiative he started to port Linux to Apple Silicon-based laptops and desktops. While he wasn’t the first to put a Linux install on an Apple machine (that honor goes to the security company Corellium, which released a proof of concept just weeks after the M1 Mac’s release), Asahi helped to make Linux viable on a variety of machines, while improving the technical community’s understanding of a chip that was considered exotic upon its initial 2020 release.

The reason he was well-positioned to do so? He spent years reverse-engineering video game consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii, giving him a skill set well-suited for working in exotic architectures. Asahi played a key role in his rise within the Linux ranks. And Linux itself has benefited from Asahi, which has introduced a variety of technical innovations that end-users have benefited greatly from, especially on the graphics front.

But a toxic combination of burnout and Rust drama recently led Martin to step aside.

The burnout part is, in many ways, to be expected: Martin was doing an ambitious thing that hadn’t been done before, and that created pressure within the community around his work, pressure that didn’t abate as the team grew.

But the Rust drama? That’s something else entirely.

Rust Induces A Culture Clash

In the fall of 2022, Rust joined C and assembly code as one of the approved languages for the Linux kernel, which has been a significant cultural change for Linux as a whole. Essentially, you have people who have been maintaining parts of the kernel for 20+ years being asked to support a new language, one favored by the next generation of programmers because of its perceived type safety advantages. It hasn’t gone well.

While I assume most of my readers don’t know much about programming in these languages, I assume the idea of new generations of people encroaching on someone else’s territory is fairly universal. Compare it to the periodic rap vs. rock debates, or those who think the current seasons of SNL suck but love the ones they watched in high school.

And while it has been a significant evolution in the kernel, it’s one that has been hard for old-school maintainers to swallow, and the pushback has already burned out some notable contributors.

Martin’s downfall came after a kernel maintainer blocked a Rust contribution, calling the idea of Rust in Linux a “cancer,” and implying that anything that wasn’t in the C language would damage the maintainability of the codebase. Martin weighed in, upset about what he saw as obstructionist behavior, and implied that he needed to go to social media and draw his following into the debate just to get anything done about it.

That was when Linux founder Linus Torvalds stepped in with a characteristically brusque comment, though in a way that was relatively measured for him: “How about you accept the fact that maybe the problem is you,” Torvalds told Martin. “You think you know better. But the current process works.”

Martin didn’t take that well—and responded by removing himself as an active kernel maintainer. “I no longer have any faith left in the kernel development process or
community management approach,” he wrote.

In his announcement of departing Asahi and handing off its leadership to the rest of the primary maintainers, he made clear that the complexity of the task he gave himself was not a boon for easy interpersonal interactions.

“Suffice it to say, being in a position to have to upstream code across practically every Linux subsystem, touching drivers of all categories as well as some common code, is an incredibly frustrating experience,” he wrote.

I’m sure you could critique his personal style every day of the week, and I’m sure many already have. But I think that ignores the bigger picture.

Bigger Questions For Linux

Whether or not you agree that Rust should have a role in the Linux operating system, or you think Martin should have handled himself better in the situation, the saga highlights a deeper tension. Simply put, the Rust saga suggests a generational chasm opening up.

Martin, in his early 30s, came up from completely different roots compared to many current kernel maintainers, who are often doing their work as employees of larger institutions, or have been active maintainers for decades. (Example: Christoph Hellwig, the maintainer whose opposition to Rust entering the kernel kicked off this mess, has been contributing to the Linux kernel for more than 20 years while working as a consultant. Beyond his skill set, key to bringing NVMe support to the Linux kernel, he is known as a fighter, having once sued VMware over a licensing violation.)

Martin doesn’t have an employer supporting his work: His funding, at least until now, has been through a successful pages on Patreon and other crowdfunding sources. Put simply, while he is building a project for the community, his approach is like that of a content creator—not an uncommon state of affairs these days for open-source maintainers. (FWIW, Asahi Lina, a vTuber-style character who often posts live programming sessions of Asahi development, is believed by some to be Martin’s persona, though he’s never said either way.)

And I’m sure that the rise of creator-style coders effectively rubs some old-school maintainers the wrong way. These maintainers are likely 15 to 20 years older than Martin, and they likely didn’t get their first taste of ongoing Linux kernel maintenance by hacking video game consoles. Not helping: Torvalds, who has to make calls on this sort of drama, is culturally much closer to the former than the latter.

Getting called out by Linus Torvalds most likely did not do any favors for Hector Martin’s other issue: burnout. I’m sure his motivation to stay involved in the Asahi project, already tested by the number of repetitive feature requests I’m sure he was seeing daily, evaporated the second he got a dressing down from the father of Linux himself. And I have to imagine that underlined some deeper issues he had with Linus.

“I had hoped his enthusiasm would translate to some support for our community and help with our upstreaming struggles,” Martin wrote of his relationship with the programming icon. “Sadly, that never came to pass.”

I’m sad about Martin giving up Asahi, a project that personally got me very excited about Linux in general, but I’m even sadder that a newer generation of Linux programmers, the people who will eventually take the reins of the kernel, keep running head-first into non-technical tension.

You don’t have to like Rust. But I don’t think this is entirely about Rust. This is about a new generation of programmers clashing with the old guard. I hope this gets worked out, but I’m worried it might not.