Presumably, this is an investment in replacing code written in C. There's no way around abstraction or overhead in such a venture.

> there's no way it doesn't significant put additional pressure when making breaking changes

This is the cost of investment.

> The natural reaction is that there will be less such breaking changes and interfaces will ossify.

A) "fewer", not "less". Breaking changes are countable.

B) A slower velocity of changes does not imply ossification. Furthermore, I'm not sure this is true—the benefits of formal verification of constraints surrounding memory-safety seems as if it would naturally lead to long-term higher velocity. Finally, I can't speak to the benefits of a freely-breakable kernel interface (I've never had to maintain a kernel for clients myself, thank god) but again, this seems like a worthwhile short-term investment for long-term gain.

> In addition, depending on the skill of the "binding writer" (and generally, since the rust bindings are actually designed instead of evolving organically), the second set of interfaces may simply be actually easier to use. There may not even be a point to evolving one interface, or the other. Which just further contributes to splitting the project.

Sure, this is possible. I present two questions, then: 1) what is lost with lesser popularity of the C interface with allegedly less stability, and 2) is the stability, popularity, and confidence in the new interface worth it? I think it might be, but I have no clue how to reason about the politics of the Linux ABI.

I have never written stable kernel code, so I don't have confident guidance myself. But I can say that if you put a kernel developer in front of me of genius ability, I would still trust and be more willing to engage with rust code. I cannot conceive of a C programmer skilled enough they would not benefit from the additional tooling and magnification of ability. There seems to be some attitude that if C is abandoned, something vital is lost. I submit that what is lost may not be of technical, but rather cultural (or, eek, egoist), value. Surely we can compensate for this if it is true.

EDIT, follow-up: if an unstable, less-used interface is desirable, surely this could be solved in the long term with two rust bindings.

EDIT2: in response to an aunt comment, I am surely abusing the term "ABI". I'm using it as a loose term for compatibility of interfaces at a linker-object level.

I just abandoned the code interview altogether and ask them questions about process. It's a very simple workaround, but very effective. I'll admit it helps that there are very few problems these days outside of specific problems to solve that require a high degree of technical competency to tackle.

EDIT: The process overhead seems straightforwardly worth it—rust can largely preserve semantics, offers the potential to increase confidence in code, and can encourage a new generation of contribution with a faster ramp-up to writing quality code. Notably nowhere here is a guarantee of better code quality, but presumably the existing quality-guaranteeing processes can translate fine to a roughly equivalently-capable language that offers more compile-time mechanisms for quality guarantees.

> Excluding places that do that leaves you with what exactly? Boutique shops filled with 20 year veterans?

We are on a VC forum—I imagine small shops focused on quality are quite common here.

Of course, this involves being honest with yourself about risk and reward, and we all have implicit incentives to disregard the risk until we get burned and learn to factor that in.

I don't see AI as a serious threat to the interview process unless your interview process looks a lot like hackerrank.

This reminds me of that mlk bit about the white liberal who "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"

We may be at peace, but not in terms that will hold when our grasp on power slips. Half the world wants us dead, and who can blame them? We've destroyed the world to enrich ourselves. We're not lady liberty, we're tony soprano.

The DoD is likely the most evil institution in all of history. Perhaps tied with the political parties that are its flipside. When you factor in global warming, it's undeniable.

Oh trust me it's still not that great a signal.

Hell, you can still rig a physical handset to work with bluetooth + cellphone and it'll guaranteed sound terrible.

EDIT: phrasing, wording.

That said, people have strong opinions on whether reference counting counts as GC. I say it does, but others are vehement that it does not. If it does not count as GC, I think Interlisp-D would qualify.