Wow you can tell from the first paragraph that this isn't worth reading. I read it... just out of curiousity...
For some reason the whole discussion around this Rust/C/Linux/GNU/thing is mostly focused around superficial and irrelevant things like the sexualities and genders of the Rust people
Err....
Rust people seem to be focused mostly on identity politics and dividing people into groups that are then supposed to fight each other. As I wrote earlier, I didn't invent the term "Rust people" myself - those people themselves identify as "Rust people", which is not a good thing. I code mostly in C and assembly, but I certainly don't identify as a "C person". I can also write other programming languages, and I would even learn Rust if it wasn't such a horrible Trojan horse that is clearly designed to destroy computing freedom.
.... yeah. I can confirm he has zero sane points. Let's not give this lunatic any credence.
As much as it sucks to admit, the Linux kernel would not be where it is today without the additional expertise and man-hours donated by companies. That never would have happened if it weren’t open-source, collaborative, and free for commercial use.
It feels like you're ignoring network effects here. If Linux didn't exist then something else (e.g. FreeBSD) would be much more popular and would be targeted by companies instead.
He's definitely done a huge amount of work and been very successful... But if he hadn't there's a strong chance someone else would have. So it's not like without Torvalds the web would all be running on Windows. We'd probably be using FreeBSD or something.
Or maybe Plan 9! Who knows, we might have ended up in a better state. Or worse. I doubt we wouldn't have anything though. There are too many nerds who like writing OSes for fun.
Yes I think it is possible to be really into a hobby and end up doing it professionally for your whole life with a normal brain. Why wouldn't it be? Plenty of people do that.
Indeed but you see constant comments condoning or even praising his shitty behaviour, like creating a popular kernel somehow gives him the right to be an arsehole.
I would like to see more "I'm glad he made Linux but I wish he wouldn't be so constantly abusive" and less "haha he got em again! What a good rant! You're the best Linus!".
Yeah it actually is fairly common to have the high word first because humans unfortunately picked the wrong endianness, and integers are written in big endian.
E.g. what value would you expect from u16x2_to_u32(0x1122, 0x3344)? If you said 0x11223344...
Still, the rant is stupid because all that needs to happen is to fix the name.
Honestly it's really surprising that the kernel doesn't already have a library of reliably but manipulation functions for common stuff like this.
Sort of. He's definitely right that make_u32_from_two_u16 is a terrible function name that obscures the meaning but I don't think he's right that the best solution is to inline it. C bit shifting is notoriously error prone - I've seen this bug multiple times:
uint32_t a = ...;
uint32_t b = ...;
uint64_t c = (a << 32) | b;
The real problem is the name isn't very good. E.g. it could be u32_high_low_to_u64 or something. Might clearer. Certainly easily at kernel code levels of clarity.
(Really the naming issue comes from C not having keyword arguments but you can't do anything about that.)
More like "If it isn't as good as it could be, don't do anything to improve it."