As someone who used VS Code for many years and before that PyCharm, it only took me a couple of weeks to regain full "professional productivity" after switching to Neovim. But it will take me years to master Vim.
As that kernel maintainer clearly stated this was not because the code was awful, but because the code was written in Rust and it was therefore cancer.
From the horse's mouth (lkml; Hellwig's headers chopped for brevity):
On Thu, Jan 16, 2025 at 02:17:24PM +0100, Danilo Krummrich wrote:
> Since there hasn't been a reply so far, I assume that we're good with
> maintaining the DMA Rust abstractions separately.
No, I'm not. This was an explicit:
Nacked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
And I also do not want another maintainer. If you want to make Linux
impossible to maintain due to a cross-language codebase do that in
your driver so that you have to do it instead of spreading this cancer
to core subsystems. (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language
codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade).
---
Hellwig was abrasive and unreasonable. But there is no need to perpetuate, repeat, and repost absolutely one-sided, self-serving misrepresentations of the words he used.
You don't need to paraphrase. You don't need to guess. You don't need to distill or simplify.
He wrote English so we could read it; stop paraphrasing. It's unhelpful at best and nefarious at worst.
Edit: I think it's very telling that there is a crowd here that would literally downvote the actual quote. Actually it's more sad than anything.
Worse, JD Vance has said repeatedly that they WANT courts to rule against them, so that they can directly challenge the court's power. I believe his exact words were "Let the court enforce it." Which of course is a sick joke - courts have no enforcement power without the executive branch.
They fully intend to cause a constitutional crisis on purpose. It's all in plain sight, in their own words. America will get what it voted for.
I've been using Neovim for about 6 months now but as a former VS Code user I was mostly investing into the various plugins. Fairly recently I started digging deeper into vim's built-in features such as vimgrep and quickfix and they are incredibly powerful. It will take me probably another year to learn to use all these tools effectively.
I'm playing with Guix and even made a dedicated installation. I find it more attractive than Nix (more sane language, shepherd service manager), but it lacks in diversity of packages and many of the ones I require are very stale.
I was told you don't need to subscribe to the mailing list, but I've sent mailing list messages with patches, discussions on technical issues that were never accepted.
For context, Determinate is a startup made of the Nix guy and some of the senior community members. They explicitly support the Steam Deck (and used it as a test case to create their installer).
Not just senior community members, DetSys is the company of the creator of nix.
This installer and the relationship between DetSys and Nix has also been subject to major criticism about conflict of interest between community interests and DetSys, since everyone agrees the official Nix installer has major issues. "Determinate Nix" (as DetSys calls the nix configured with their installer) also enables features that are the de-facto way to use Nix these days, but are disabled in the default distribution because of... let's say... commitment issues.
If you want a community run alternative, try Lix. They have a version of the DetSys installer too - and they actually cut releases of nix instead of building moats around it.
There should (hopefully) be an ~official-nix version of the detsys installer in the ~near future. (That said, one slice of the reasons this has taken a while is that the upstream Nix variant is obliged to stick to official features for now.)
It's basically at the point where it just needs a redirect from the nixos.org domain, and for the project/community to work through how to manage its development/relationship to the Nix repo.
Lix is excellent. It is already faster (parsing), safer (better defaults, removed footguns), and easier to use (better errors, etc) than Nix. If anyone wants to get started using Nix then I highlight recommend you install Lix from the link in the parent comment.
Lix is a fork of Nix (the program, "CppNix") and also an alternative community. They provide a few ways to install, like nixpkgs itself, but also a DetSys installer fork.
It's generally a response to corporate interests (including Anduril, who put Nix on autonomous weapons) and elbow-shoving so-called meritocracy (including a very infamous concern troll) becoming dominant inside the Nix community and Nix leadership, by people who didn't want to work from inside the system to reform, but also know they can't maintain all of Nixpkgs by themselves either (which already bled a bunch of maintainers).
Just out of curiosity, have you checked out Spack, https://github.com/spack/spack, which has a lot of HPC users. Support for mixing and matching both system and from source dependencies has been extremely useful in my work.
Unironically, the comments such as yours are downvoted. I had an idealised view about our industry, but it has now shattered during the course of the last year.
College grads have an idealized view of tech industry. But it's all about money at the end of the day and tech is turning into something similar to other industries like oil or pharma.
It's not that these diversity policies were effective at addressing the underlying issue, they looked ridiculous to someone from the outside. What is hilarious and scary at the same time, is how these global corporations, the supposed progressive forces, are reversing them in quick succession one after another one 2 weeks into Trump's presidency.
I recently read another great post by the same author about the connection between optimisation with constraints and backpropagation algorithm https://archives.argmin.net/2016/05/18/mates-of-costate/ Apparently based on older LeCun's paper.
reply