Antioxidant Manifesto

ANTIOXIDANT MANIFESTO To be distrubuted at the Kernel Maintainer Summit in Vienna. WHO KILLED THE DINOSAUR? Firefox in 2009 has been the fastest, most popular browser. Naturally— it has been written in C/C++. Firefox now is below 3% market share— losing 30 million users every year. What happened? It started in 2009— Mozilla have announced a new language Rust. Learning nothing from their last never rewrite the browser tragedy they planned to again rewrite the browser. Mozilla in 2020 has halted all development on the rewrite and laid off all Rust programmers. Too little too late— the company has been doomed, the CEO in 2024 resigned and Google are expected to end the contract for funding leaving the company drying up. What a tragedy but it has not ended there. What happened to Mozilla happens to the whole of the software world, where you work might be next. TRAINING WHEELS Linux has adopted this language to appeal young people to work in the kernel while not knowing C. Young programmers now have less skill due to less experience, in many cases to be honest also lower intelligence, this is an “incompetency crisis" that experts are overtaken by people with less skill— not only in software development but here we see acutely the effects. To avoid the bugs of brokenly written C/C++ it has been common sense for beginner developers to use beginner languages before they graduate to knowing C/C++. Now a beginner language is preferred for systems programming, an advanced topic of programming. Our priorities are being inverted. Rust is marketed as automatic memory management without GC— actually, it has reference counting, this still is GC but slower, this is documented obviously in the runtime library but when raised with its users flatly denied. To know their own language so poorly is concerning, it should cause alarm, however the community encourages to not look under the hood and learn internals and this attitude has been reinforced. Pointers are accessed in “unsafe”— this is needed in the kernel, however using it is actively discouraged as with Actix developer who was chased out from Rust. Remaining users work instead in “safe" designed as familiar to web scripting, note for example keyword "let."

The image shows a dark-background manifesto titled “ANTIOXIDANT MANIFESTO,” presented as a text document for distribution at the Kernel Maintainer Summit in Vienna. It argues that Rust and beginner-friendly programming practices have weakened software development, using Mozilla and Firefox as examples, and frames the shift away from C/C++ as a “training wheels” problem. The joke is a satirical, exaggerated anti-Rust rant aimed at systems programmers and Linux kernel culture, useful as a reaction to debates about Rust, programming language choices, and declining technical standards.

• @gentoomemes / 14550 2024-11-07