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I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

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Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#331

Post by raxxorrax »

bsder wrote: post #320
munificent wrote: post #149

I think Steve has a well earned reputation for being decent and trustworthy. I can understand the desire here for more details so that others can come to a firmer conclusion but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships. At the same time, saying nothing publicly is read as taci…

I think this is simply Rust having to deal with switching from "minimize conflict" to "manage conflict". Corporate entities don't really care about "inclusiveness" or "minimizing conflict". So, Rust governance will either grow the structures and leadership to "manage conflict" or get steamrolled.

Not sure if that will go well since it is people at Amazon that will insert themselves here and you get corporate governance.

Not really sure I am convinced on the result of languages and frameworks managed by big tech, although I believe Amazon to perhaps be the better players among them.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#332

Post by xiphias2 »

Decabytes wrote: post #91

I actually really like Zig's stance on this. Not having company members on the Board + trying to employ developers from the community helps with the issues that Rust is currently facing. Of course due to Rust's history things work differently, but hopefully Steve's comments will get them to look at this issue more critically

Zig is a very immature language without any real corporate backing. Things get hard when an open source project gets mature and incredibly useful for corporations.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#333

Post by mnk47 »

ilaksh wrote: post #322
type0 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also suspect that deep down the true concern Klabnik has is that Steve Klabnik thinks Rust is about him, or... Oh, don't post this kind of personal attacks.

It's not a personal attack. It's just a theory. There was nothing substantive in the article.

There was nothing substantive in the article because it got edited soon after his tweet. https://web.archive.org/web/20210913110658/https://www.infow...

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#334

Post by kristoff_it »

xiphias2 wrote: post #332
Decabytes wrote: post #91

I actually really like Zig's stance on this. Not having company members on the Board + trying to employ developers from the community helps with the issues that Rust is currently facing. Of course due to Rust's history things work differently, but hopefully Steve's comments will get them to look at this issue more critically

Zig is a very immature language without any real corporate backing. Things get hard when an open source project gets mature and incredibly useful for corporations.

Well, this is already starting to change. As an example Coil (coil.com) has written a distributed financial database called TigerBeetle (tigerbeetle.com) entirely in Zig. All of this will be part of the open source stack that they plan to offer to third paties that want to get into the interledger (interledger.org) business, a piece of financial infrastructure key to make web monetization (webmonetization.org) real, among other things.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#335

Post by volta83 »

nabakin wrote: post #318

I think Steve is being too vague for me to understand well. Let me see if I can break it down. Steve is suggesting Amazon is becoming a problem to the future of Rust. He is suggesting that Amazon is coming to control Rust. The evidence he is giving to this end is: 1. An Amazon employee creating Rust principles that shape the community 2. An Amazon employee being effectively in control of the Rust Foundation because t…

FWIW these are not "Amazon employees that infiltrated the Rust ranks to take over".

Mozilla fired everybody, and companies heavily invested in Rust like Amazon, Facebook, etc. hired them.

So over night some people have labeled the opinions and work of these people as "Amazon opinions".

Amazon has a lot of people working on improving Rust itself, and this gives them power, because they decide on what stuff the people they are paying work on, so that stuff gets done sooner, and often better, than the stuff done by volunteers on their free time.

There are other companies invested in Rust, so if they see this as a problem, they can hire more people to work on Rust too.

Steve criticizes this, but their criticism is not constructive, since they propose no solution.

As long as people that work on Rust get paid by companies, those companies control what they work on, and that's going to be something that these companies care about.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#336

Post by nabakin »

volta83 wrote: post #335
nabakin wrote: post #318

I think Steve is being too vague for me to understand well. Let me see if I can break it down. Steve is suggesting Amazon is becoming a problem to the future of Rust. He is suggesting that Amazon is coming to control Rust. The evidence he is giving to this end is: 1. An Amazon employee creating Rust principles that shape the community 2. An Amazon employee being effectively in control of the Rust Foundation because t…

FWIW these are not "Amazon employees that infiltrated the Rust ranks to take over". Mozilla fired everybody, and companies heavily invested in Rust like Amazon, Facebook, etc. hired them. So over night some people have labeled the opinions and work of these people as "Amazon opinions". Amazon has a lot of people working on improving Rust itself, and this gives them power, because they decide on what stuff the people…

Yeah of course, these are members of the community that were already contributing a great deal and just hired by Amazon. However, if Amazon is able to control the project and makes decisions for itself instead of the entire community of developers, that's a problem. My inexperienced opinion in OSS project management is leadership should be representative of the users and not cater to a subset.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#337

Post by potamic »

yannoninator wrote: post #6

Still don't know why we should let these big tech companies have board seats on programming language foundations for them to have the power to do this. I feared this would happen months ago when Facebook joined the board and even talked to steve about my concerns [0] [1]. Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125591 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2698928…

This really did not age well. There's a problem with this kind of absolute logical reasoning that it's impossible to argue against.

"Sure this company has showed evil in the past, but what specific data do you have to show that they will be evil again?"

"Sure this structure allows the company to have a lot of power, but what specifically makes you think they will abuse it?"

This kind of specious reasoning is far too common in the corporate world to remove resistance to any unpopular sentiments. There comes a point where you really have to trust your gut on something and go with it even if you cannot logically justify it in the moment. That's what separates visionaries from tacticians.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#338

Post by unanswered »

steveklabnik wrote: post #44
poppejans wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not let them have the foundation chair. I think Ashley would've made a great chairwoman, but she just might not have wanted to become chairwoman of the foundation.

> she just might not have wanted to become chairwoman of the foundation. I can assure you she would have been happy to continue to be the executive director. I talked about this briefly in the thread, but wasn't quite clear enough, so might as well also elaborate here, since it was brought up. I am not worried that she will not be the next ED. I mean, I would have preferred it, but it's not my decision to make. The s…

JFC, that's what you're dog whistling about?! That Ashley "all men are bad and I won't apologize" Williams got fired? Good riddance, and you can go with her.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#339

Post by tialaramex »

pjmlp wrote: post #329
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. I may have read more into GP’s post than they intended. I assumed given the issues present in the tread and the original tweets, I assumed they were referring to the Committee submission document from 2020 [1] and the ‘uproar’ from non-FAANG developers. 1 - http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...

Well, given that Google has reduced their contributions to ISO C++ and clang/LLVM, it appears the ISO is working as intended, where everyone has one vote, despite wanting more.

Ultimately the votes at ISO are on behalf of sovereign entities, and so you should be glad that it rarely comes to that, since I don't think you necessarily agree that Ireland and Kenya each ought to have the same weight as the United States of America when it comes to C++.

I would suggest the "reduced contributions" means that - unsurprisingly - Google thinks Chandler, Titus and co. were right and so since the C++ Committee doesn't endorse the performance goals that means C++ will gradually become less suitable for them and they should expect to begin migrating off it in the foreseeable future.

In Prague in 2020 the committee also signalled that it recognised the concerns about Undefined Behaviour from much of the C++ programmer community, but as with Epochs, the enthusiasm for actually doing anything is extremely limited, the committee promises that it doesn't want to actively make things worse if possible, which is as Antonin Scalia would say "Weak sauce".

So, I think the direction of C++ for the next decade is, maintain old C++ code, ensure opportunities for people writing books and selling consultancy, don't worry too much about making it any faster, nor any safer. Plenty of people will be happy with that. Lots more will not.

One of the things to watch from Google will be whether it deprioritizes LLVM or mostly Clang. Lots of other interesting projects care about LLVM and traditionally benefited from work done to make Clang better, but if Clang ceases to be the priority the LLVM work still needs to be done.

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