An Idiot with a YouTube Channel

It would seem ragebaiting against #rust (and by association, anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan), is a present-day, engagement-farming cash crop. Now comes a youtuber with his John Deere and field-hand commenters (no link, you are better off) to say “rust-bad cuz linked lists” and some other nonsense that you can’t use linked lists in the Linux kernel with rust.

I am not a Linux kernel developer, but I have a strong suspicion neither is this idiot. It took all of two seconds of googling to find on kernel.org the rust linked list. The upside to this is that I did learn something new today about rust and the linux kernel, even if it is the exact opposite message being given.

Now, if you are not familiar with Rust then this is probably all very puzzling. Here is the summary: writing a linked list in Rust is more difficult than it is in other languages, such as C or Java, because of Rust’s ownership model. More difficult… but not impossible.

So not impossible that there is an entire on-line book called Learning Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists. It teaches Rust by walking through the creation of 7 types of linked lists. SEVEN! Like srsly, how many of you even knew there seven types?

But the best thing about that book is the intro:

Just so we’re totally 100% clear: I hate linked lists. With a passion. Linked lists are terrible data structures.

…

Linked lists are as niche and vague of a data structure as a trie. Few would balk at me claiming a trie is a niche structure that your average programmer could happily never learn in an entire productive career – and yet linked lists have some bizarre celebrity status.

And that is true. I can probably count on four fingers the 3 times I have needed one in my career. We probably all learn linked lists because they are a great teaching tool on the subject of pointers. But they really aren’t all that common in use.

Similar to my usage of linked lists are the number of times I have commented on a YouTube video. But I did on his video, probably because it made me dumber by watching it. My comment was straightforward and just a link to the rust kernel docs. He deleted it within 5 minutes.

@andy To be precise Linux Kernel uses _intrusive linked lists_, and that's a little different caliber of beast especially with their use case.