Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds [Full-length]

That's a caricature of his actual position, please be more honest than that. edit: Here's another video that does a better job of conveying his reasons for being the way he is. ▶ this video He's also been on record as saying multiple times that a lot of it is because he comes from a culture that's much more abrasive than US.

I'd like to piggy-back on your mention of Linus. It reminds me of a recent video I saw wherein he talked about how the work on the kernel works within a natural hierarchy. The whole video, IMHO is worth a watch, but the relevant snippet is here, you can watch from about 15:57 to about 18:20 to get the idea: ▶ this video I especially liked his comment at the end of this section: "The way people work ... is inherent in our brains ... the whole development process ... works really well ... we used the hierarchy that just worked on its own, and that turns out to be the right hierarchy."

in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os. he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment. the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: ▶ this video

DrillShopper has already posted ( link ) the technical reason on why Linux does not do it this way: link Additionally, there is politics in play here. Not the politics that is normally discussed outside of HN, but the politics of having companies (at least) release the detailed specifications of their hardware. I cannot really state authoritatively what the Linux developers think on this side, but Linus brandishing his middle finger to Nvidia ( ▶ this video ) says a lot of things.

> I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well. Indeed, that's a huge advantage of Linux, the fact that we all run the same Linux kernel and benefit from improvements coming from all directions. Linus himself mentions this advantage here: ▶ this video There's a nice recent benchmark here (Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS): link Bcachefs is starting to look really good against Btrfs, no APFS or ZFS though, but still interesting nonetheless.

Steve Klabnik has done a lot for systems programming and that post is a lot more even-handed than you're suggesting. If, however, we're talking about the kernel then perhaps we should listen to what Torvalds says about this topic. "People who designed C, designed it at a time where the language had to be geared towards the output, so when I read C I can think about the Assembly that it will create": ▶ this video Consider that he said this in a time with C++, even if Rust was in its infancy: it is not as tied to the assembly it produces. Not by a long shot.

Linus seems to disagree with you. Albeit old ▶ this video It remains true. Rust uses references all over the place and reuses the same memory addresses within stack that once belonged to another object because the compiler can guarantee it, but that makes it much less reasonable to write. If you can reason with -O0 you can take it that your code will remain correct in later levels.

I agree.. people can be dishonest and hurtful while being perfectly polite, just like they can be honest, kind and caring while swearing like sailors. That is the difference that matters. When you ignore that and just look at the form, you get link Here's Linux talking about being straightforward, and why he cannot afford ambiguity: ▶ this video

I remember Linus mentioning [0] about the major benefits of tuning Linux for super computers that came to be really useful for when trying to get performance out of a mobile phones decades later. [0]: ▶ this video

That's an unfair judgement toward the C development community as a whole. There are legitimate use cases for C. If you're writing low-level, bare-metal programs then there is no other portable programming language that offers better semantics. C programmers often laud that language because they can easily reason what the output of the compiler will be. That is an extremely important and rare property for a portable programming language. But hey, don't listen to me, listen to an actual experienced C programmer: ▶ this video

While the post is fantastic in showing the pros/cons of the other languages, it doesn't talk about the advantages of C, advantages to some people at least. Here's Linus on replacing C: ▶ this video

This is the part of that talk, I believe: ▶ this video I actually find his reasons quite convincing, I think he's got a point.