I haven't either, until I read comments on Rust in Linux on social media outside HN.
Apparently, Rust is part of the "woke agenda"
I haven't either, until I read comments on Rust in Linux on social media outside HN.
Apparently, Rust is part of the "woke agenda"
Yep, I noticed that under a lot of videos mentioning rust in kernel, or rust in general there's a high chance that the comment section will just be straight up lifted from 4chan pol or a similar place
Is there any particular reason for this? Do they not agree with the code of conduct more than normal?
Complete disagreement with codes of conduct and the typical political orientation of their proponents. Also, pure contrarian spirit.
That is a crude and politically inept way of putting it, but do you not think there is some grain of truth to it?
If you opt into something with as high a barrier to entry and necessary time commitment as a programming language, you naturally also opt into the existing community around that language, because that will be where the potential contributors, people to help you solve issues, and people you have to talk to if you need the language or ecosystem to move in some direction will hail from. In turn, the community will naturally get to impose its own values and aesthetic preferences onto you, whether by proactively using the position of relative power they have over you, or simply by osmosis. As it happens, the community surrounding Rust does largely consist of American progressives, which should not be surprising - after all, the language was created by an American company whose staff famously threatened mutiny when its own CEO turned out to offend progressive sensibilities.
As such, it is natural that bringing Rust into your project would over time result in it becoming more "woke", just like using Ruby would make it more likely that you attract Japanese contributors, or targeting Baikal CPUs would result in you getting pulled into the Russian orbit. The "woke" side themselves recognises this effect quite well, which is why they were so disturbed when Framework pushed Omarchy as a Linux distribution.
Of course, one needs to ask whether it is fair to insinuate premeditation by calling a mere expected effect an "agenda". Considering the endlessly navel-gazing nature of the culture wars, I would find it surprising if there weren't at least some people out there who make the same observation as above, and do think along the lines that driving Rust adoption is [also] a good thing because of it. Thus, Rust adoption does become, in a sense, part of the "woke agenda", just as Rust rejection becomes, perhaps even more clearly so, part of the "chud agenda".
> As such, it is natural that bringing Rust into your project would over time result in it becoming more "woke", just like using Ruby would make it more likely that you attract Japanese contributors, or targeting Baikal CPUs would result in you getting pulled into the Russian orbit. The "woke" side themselves recognises this effect quite well, which is why they were so disturbed when Framework pushed Omarchy as a Linux distribution.
I think this analysis is basically accurate - there's no conspiracy or even deliberate agenda going on, it's just that the community surrounding Rust happens to have (at the moment, anyway) a relatively high number of American progressives, many of whom are openly interested in imposing American progressive ideological norms in spaces they care about (which is basically what we mean by the term "woke").
I think Rust is a good software tool and I would like to see it be as widely adopted and politically-neutral as C is, and used in all sorts of projects run by all sorts of people with all sorts of other agendas, political or otherwise. Consequently, I would like to see people and projects who do not agree with American progressive norms adopt the language and become active users of it, which will help dilute the amount of Rust users who are progressives. I myself am not an American political progressive and I have lots of issues with the stated politics of many well-known Rust developers.
We need more effective ways to prevent ideological capture of our institutions especially when there is no actual connection between an institution's mission (e.g., to support the use of Rust) and religion, politics, sexuality or morals.
Is that stuff still going on? People were rather intense about certain politics during COVID, but outside of some furries on the Rust discord I haven't noticed anything outwardly political?
I don't know how you would measure it, though I would assume that there is no particular reason for the people who use the language or their preferences to change? A quick search brought up that they apparently renamed their master branch to "main" very recently (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/10/16/renaming-t...) (context: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/), to the point I was more surprised that it hadn't already happened earlier.
The general temperature of politics in FOSS, I think, is not obviously lower than before: just in terms of things that made it onto HN, in the past month or so alone we have seen the aforementioned kerfuffle about dhh (the leader? founder? of Ruby on Rails), his projects and their detractors, and the wrestling over control between NixOS's board and its community moderators who were known for prosecuting political purges and wanted to assert formal authority over the former.
Reading loaded adjectives for programming languages is waste of time. I would skip that kind of social media.
People are (understandably) sick of the fact that for whatever reason, the biggest proponents of Rust are insufferable.
Personally, I'm simply bothered by the fact that (one of?) the most famous figure of Rust on Linux and Rust Forever consumes and advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community.
From what I could piece together, the only group who ever cried wolf about this is a forum full of contemptious little angry men who spend weeks researching people they hate on the internet. No one seems to want to touch the subject from fear of being associated with them.
I'll give it to you, this is not a great time.
I'm genuinely not sure who you're talking about or whether this is an accurate characterization of their views. For that matter, I'm not sure what country you're in and whether I myself agree with that country's laws about whatever kind of pornography this is. Certainly plenty of countries I don't live in and have no ties to have laws I disagree with or violate routinely.
I'm pretty suspicious of demands for communities to hold people accountable, especially when the community in question is a loose group of people who mostly communicate online and are united by their shared use of a specific programming technology; and who probably disagree on all sorts of other issues, including contentious ones.
> advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community
If some form of speech is illegal in your country it does automatically mean it should be illegal for the whole world or that it is wrong or that the world-wide community should adhere to standards specific to your country. Even if that country is USA.
In other words, nobody should give a flying f about open source developers porn preferences.
Who are you talking about? Asking in good faith, I never heard of that controversy before
The (retired?) head of a project trying to port Linux on Mac. I avoid naming names, not to be cryptic but because a lot of people like to stumble on these kinds of posts via search. Or moderate them. I'm not agreeing, but I can see why it's easier.
> Personally, I'm simply bothered by the fact that (one of?) the most famous figure of Rust on Linux and Rust Forever consumes and advocates for pornography that's illegal in my country, without being held accountable by the community.
Your abhorrent personal opinion of another individual has no place in a technical discussion.
Please, don't use loaded, provocative, and most importantly, irrelevant terms in these discussions. It helps nothing and serves nobody.