Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
This is what adoption and maturity looks like. As the language starts to see serious use, you see companies start to consider the language's future and direction.
Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
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Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#12Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
The kinds of things that Facebook most often receives flak for would be difficult to pursue though the layer of indirection that is sponsoring a foundation dedicated to the Rust programming language.
Similarly, since Facebook isn't a software vendor, the kinds of things that you might achieve by securing undue influence within the Rust Foundation don't really benefit them.
Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#13Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#14This is a great step for the Rust Foundation and a sign that Rust is transitioning successfully to a foundation model rather than a Mozilla-centric organization.
It looks like some people are worried about Facebook's influence on Rust, but that doesn't seem like a huge concern to me. Facebook isn't going to want to influence Rust in any particularly "Facebooky" way since it's such a deep-in-the-infrastructure component. They will just have the same concerns that many other large tech companies have, like, can you use it successfully in an environment that has a zillion engineers and a zillion other programming languages to interoperate with. It's important for Rust to be nice to use at both big and small companies so that's a good sort of voice to have in the foundation.
Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#15Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
Rust should include in their license: "The Software/Language shall be used for Good, not Evil" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...
Since that line could be interpreted as just "The Software/Language shall be used for Good", any software that is not explicitly "Good" would be forbidden to use Rust, effectively making Rust useless in 90% of companies.
Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#16Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#17Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#18Statement from the Rust Foundation: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-membership... It seems there are a few new silver members as well.
The Facebook Member director's letter linked there is also very interesting:
https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducin...
Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#19Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
It had to happen, the only way to make a programming language successful is to have it backed by most big tech companies.
They can contribute without having any special status. Rust already has a robust RFC process and good technical leadership. My worry is that these things weaken and rust very gradually becomes your typical corporate software product where more and more independent features are just bolted on without care to any larger vision. That won’t happen if FB, etc keep contributing as ordinary contributors. But it could happen if they’re elevated to a position of leadership.
Re: Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
#20Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
Facebook has been contributing to the Rust ecosystem for a long time; they've been sponsoring Rust conferences for the past few years, they've had employees helping do work as part of the teams.
EDIT: oh, they've also published another post detailing their history with Rust. Lots of very interesting things in here! https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/