Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

This is like vi vs Emacs with 'religious overtones,’ project chief laughs

Linux is 33 years old. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, still enjoys an argument or two but is baffled why the debate over Rust has attracted so much heat.

"I'm not sure why Rust has been such a contentious area," Torvalds said during an on-stage chat this week with Dirk Hohndel, Verizon's Head of Open Source.

"It reminds me of when I was young and people were arguing about vi versus Emacs," said the software engineer. Hohndel interjected, "They still are!"

Torvalds laughed, "Maybe they still are! But for some reason, the whole Rust versus C discussion has taken almost religious overtones."

Getting Rust into the Linux kernel has been a hot topic for some time. In 2022, developers were arguing over the language, with some calling the memory safety features of Rust an "insult" to some of the hard work that had gone into the kernel over the years. At the beginning of September, one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux projects stepped down, citing frustration with "nontechnical nonsense" as a reason for resignation.

During the conversation at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Vienna this week, Torvalds continued, "Clearly, there are people who just don't like the notion of Rust, and having Rust encroach on their area.

"People have even been talking about the Rust integration being a failure … We've been doing this for a couple of years now so it's way too early to even say that, but I also think that even if it were to become a failure – and I don't think it will – that's how you learn," he said.

"So I see the whole Rust thing as positive, even if the arguments are not necessarily always [so]."

Keen to pull those positives from the row, Torvalds added, "One of the nice parts about Rust has been how it's livened up discussions," before acknowledging, "some of the arguments get nasty, and people do actually - yes - decide 'this is not worth my time,' but at the same time it's kind of interesting, and I think it shows how much people care."

"C is, in the end, a very simple language. It's one of the reasons I enjoy C and why a lot of C programmers enjoy C, even if the other side of that picture is obviously that because it's simple it's also very easy to make mistakes," he argued.

"And Rust is not."

With impressive diplomacy, considering his outbursts of years past, Torvalds went on, "There's a lot of people who are used to the C model, and they don't necessarily like the differences... and that's ok.

"Some people care about specific architectures, and some people like file systems, and that's how it should be. That's how I see Rust."

The arguments seem set to run a good while yet. Towards the end of the discussion, Hohndel joked that Torvalds had been the figurehead of the Linux project for the last 33 years but would be unlikely to perform the same role for another 33 years.

Hopefully, the arguments over Rust will have been settled by then.

Or maybe not. After all, vi and Emacs date back to the 1970s and discussions over editor preference remain ongoing. ®