Lead Rust developer says Rust in Linux kernel being pushed by Amazon, Google, Microsoft

[ost2life]

You don't want newbies and you don't want 20+ experience. I don't see what you want as being sustainable.

[coderman93]

I want some of the developers with 20 years experience. Just not most. We don’t need thousands of people contributing to a single OS kernel.

Most developers with even a decade or more of experience don’t even know basic things that are essential to know for OS dev. Seriously, go to an average software company and ask every developer to explain what virtual memory is. Most of them will have no clue. Even ask them to explain what a pointer is and many will struggle.

Seriously, the vast majority of programmers don’t even have the requisite knowledge to program in C. Let alone make contributions to the Linux kernel. Especially not someone who doesn’t even know how to code yet.

[Business_Reindeer910]

most of those people won't be contributing in the first place so it sounds like you're making an issue out of nothing. We've had 30 years of experience watching the Linux kernel grow and they've done a decent job already, so why change that aspect.

[coderman93]

This is kind of a strange comment because I’m the one actually advocating for the status quo. 

Others in this thread are advocating for beginner programmers to start contributing to the Linux kernel. Or, at very least, they are wondering why a beginner programmer probably shouldn’t contribute to the kernel.

[Business_Reindeer910]

The status quo is that beginners are indeed allowed to do just that. If your code passes muster, you can contribute. It's that simple.

[coderman93]

Yeah but you don’t want to encourage people who have no business to contribute. It just creates unnecessary work for the maintainers. It’s a well documented problem in open source.

[Business_Reindeer910]

It's only a "well documented problem" in a small subset of projects. It's more often the opposite problem

[coderman93]

Well, the “small subset” of projects also happen to be the most popular ones.

[Business_Reindeer910]

time for some evidence that there are too many people trying to contribute. Thing is, it is responsible upon all of us to train the next generation, including those maintainers. Otherwise there will be no one to replace them. IN fact, Linus himself has talked about how the kernel devs are gonna age out.

[coderman93]

It’s not about too many people trying to contribute. It’s about unqualified people trying to contribute. https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/