Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
I am in love with this awsome document; I love its guidelines, and coding conventions.
However, when Rust was introduced into the kernel, they butchered these beautiful guidelines, I know it’s hard to look at such heretic actions, but you have to see this:
The default settings of
rustfmtare used. This means the idiomatic Rust style is followed. For instance, 4 spaces are used for indentation rather than tabs.
How can this even relate to the ideology of the first document? I am deeply saddened by these new rules.
I know this is “The Rust experiment”, but this must be fixed before it’s too late! This has to reach someone.
A counter-argument might be:
The code should be formatted using
rustfmt. In this way, a person contributing from time to time to the kernel does not need to learn and remember one more style guide. More importantly, reviewers and maintainers do not need to spend time pointing out style issues anymore, and thus less patch roundtrips may be needed to land a change.
And to that I say that rustfmt is configurable per project, and if it isn’t, then it has to be. Doesn’t something like .editorconfig exist?
The previous document was written in a time when only C was the language in the Kernel. Now that two different languages and eco systems exist, it makes lot of sense to not mix them up. The document with guidelines for C code was needed, because there was no uniform guide that every user used. But with Rust it is different. There exist rustfmt and practically every user is learning and writing code with it and every public documentation and library is using this tool; most of them with default values.
You don’t mix C with Rust anyway, so why do you want force every Rust programmer and code formatted like C? I don’t think this is an issue that needs to be fixed. Are you programming for the Linux Kernel? Do you do it in C and Rust? Otherwise, why do you think this is a problem?