Rust has been forked to the Crab Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#61

Post by Hamuko » Tue, May 30, 2023, 8:59 AM UTC

drtgh wrote: post #41

maxehmookau wrote: post #12

At least they didn't name it Crust.

Always names with generic words which complicates the search. Rust metal, Rust the game, Rust what. And now Crab cooking, Crab fauna I'm absolutely convinced that software names are a conspiracy for to bring users to the threshold that will make them weep.

Many of the non-generic ones are even worse. C? C#? C++? D?

  Unable to look up "C++ language". The following search tokens are too short: C

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#62

Post by arp242 » Tue, May 30, 2023, 8:59 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #43

epolanski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the spirit. OSS is all about forking. My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way he prefers for whatever reasons.

Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.

If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#63

Post by preommr » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:00 AM UTC

Branching projects and diversity is always good.

But the reasons for this one are laughable. Formalising a trademark policy and a guy getting demoted to regular speaker insetad of keynote speaker? Seriously? People are screaming fascism over this?

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#64

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:00 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #54

jacquesm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.

It’s not the language that aims to be that, it’s people. And different people have different aims.

I've followed enough of the Rust debate that I'm suspicious of those people that have lost sight of that particular goal.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#65

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:02 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #62

jacquesm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.

If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.

It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else. Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#66

Post by pietro72ohboy » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:03 AM UTC

codeflo wrote: post #35

For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…

> That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others.

Could you elaborate on because I'm increasingly seeing Stallman being thrown around as a bogeyman who impeded FOSS progress for years if not decades and I really dislike this trend. It seems that his personal views (which I do not support) and eccentricity is being conflated with his contributions to FOSS. I will preface this by noting that this is "my belief" but Stallman has been a positive force in ensuring that consumers today can work, play and do practically anything on a largely free platform. Via the FSF, his contributions towards the GPL license series ensures that contributions to the Linux kernel stay open allowing the kernel to improve as a whole.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#67

Post by tomohawk » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:03 AM UTC

dijit wrote: post #47

scns wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.

Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom". That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system then obtaining in Communist China. The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in February 1957, is: "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought co…

And the reason for saying that was to get people to feel like it was ok to be critical of Mao, with the result being "reeducation" and death for any who did.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#68

Post by Nanana909 » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

codeflo wrote: post #35

For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…

Agree on all points. Something needs to change in the Rust foundation fundamentally.

But as far as forks go this one seems quite low effort. Does the tactic work if the other side knows what you’re doing?

From Ashley Williams, former founding member of the Rust Foundation (I don’t support her pretentious tone here)[1]:

> "I don't think any of the folks who are part of it are language designers," said Williams. "They didn't even do a full find-and-replace on the word 'rust' the repo. But the community doesn't have a lot of recourse in situations like this besides making kind of ridiculous gestures [to say] 'hey, we want you to engage with us differently.'"

Personally I’d be interested in ideas for alternate governance models for Rust. Should package maintainers with over a certain threshold of users be given votes? Could strike the balance between complete direct democracy anarchy and an opaque small group making the choices.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_a...

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#69

Post by somenameforme » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

dmeijboom wrote: post #14

This happened a while ago and was related to the trademark/copyright issue. It’s an immature move and I can’t take this seriously. All this does is creating unnecessary drama surrounding the Rust foundation.

I don't see how one could describe this as immature. Immature would seem to be just complaining endlessly, memeing, or otherwise being immature. Instead, they're unhappy with the direction of Mozilla/Rust, and found a perfectly good solution to the problem. That's awesome. This seems like one of the many benefits of truly open source software. You can fork not only to change code, but also culture.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#70

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 30, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

exitb wrote: post #60

coffeeblack wrote: post #31

Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees. This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and develop it into different directions. Both code and organization. And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others strife.

Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.

Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of long term software development is absolutely astounding, especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your dirty laundry out of the public eye if you really care about Rust.