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Linus Torvalds Vents Over "Completely Crazy Rust Format Checking"
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Because
rustfmtdoes not have enough proper customisations.I just started Rust a few days ago and after my code became >20 lines (following the docs, understanding the basics), I decided to look for a formatting tool for Rust.
I found out
rustfmt, read :and was kinda happy.
And since in
cmakeI useBreakBeforeBraces: Allman, I looked for a similar option.Found out in the docs, it was not available in stable. inner-thoughts: How old is Rust? I already waited 4+ years before picking it up. Well, let's look up the unstable features on GitHub.
There are 2 configuration options relevant to the functionality.
Both of them have enough parts where they don't work, so they are useless even if I were to use the unstable version of
rustfmt.And it seems like either none of the people participating in that issue is good enough to make changes in its source code or the
rustfmtteam doesn't want that feature implemented.And if someone requires a reason for Allman style for
BreakBeforeBraces:The Allman style makes it much easier to identify block scopes without having to rely upon IDE features such as highlighting.
Sure, it might be missing features. But the main point is that rustfmt is pretty standard in Rust and is easy to enable and integrate. So even if features YOU want to have are missing, there could be a default configuration of what is configurable. I would expect that from a big project like Linux. Linus should never be in the position he was, by Googling and finding these options. It should have been as a configuration enforced as standard for every contributor.
Well, it's not in that bad a condition.
All options (hopefully, because I didn't check) that are applicable to any version of
rustfmtare available usingrustfmt --print-config defaultand you only need to use the internet in case you either did not understand the option from the name or if you are looking for an option not in your specific version.That was most probably just another instance of oversight, I'd say.
The one determining which configuration went into the formatting configuration (or the one making the default one, in case there was no config file for the Linux project), might have just not thought of that particular implication of the option been set.