Techrights

GNU is Turning 41 Next Week and It'll Outlive Linux

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 23, 2024

An associate reminded us today: "Next week is the anniversary of GNU!" (Manifesto turns 40 in half a year)

And yes, that's one week after the Techrights reboot/relaunch. They're exactly one week apart, so it's easy to remember...

"I still don't fully understand what will happen to Linux," I said, more so "when Rust jumps the shark (they already embedded Rust in some important parts of it and hence, Theodore Ts'o complained"*).

I am quite certain that GNU, which is about to turn 41, will outlive the now Rust-inflicted Linux kernel. "It will be easy to sneak bad/harmful C code past Rust specialists and vice versa," the associate said.

We made this point a week ago and prior to it.

"Then there is the matter of split effort," the associate continued, "with C specialists wasting time fiddling with Rust which they are not efficient in. And the heavy Microsoft influence over Rust."

GNU is 8 years older than Linux and it does not have this Rust problem because it is highly modularised. If some GNU programs are rewritten in some other language and "fall off" later, that's not the same as a large monolithic kernel (heading towards 50,000,000 lines of code) doing a mishmash. █

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• Speaking of a reboot/relaunch of sites, 5 years ago Theodore (Ted) Ts'o explained why he had dumped WordPress. Revisit "Switching to Hugo", which meant he dropped all the past comments. In the social control media era blog comments did not matter much anymore.