Interesting point about function pointers. Maybe Linus is saying (in many more words) to use virtual dispatch only in appropriate places but not as a basis for an entire language? He would be in disagreement with every language designer who has added some kind of first class dispatch or pluggable modules. Not that such disagreement would be surprising, but that seems to be what he's saying. He suggested looking to other languages for GC and concurrency support, but in that thread I didn't see any desire for dispatch or modularity beyond what C offers.