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Rust 1.5

blog.rust-lang.org

41–50 of 159 posts

Re: Rust 1.5

#41
post #23

Browsing the names of contributors, I was surprised at the lack of gender diversity. Four or five female contributors at the very most. Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?

10% of the contributers are only known by username. It's not unreasonable to assume that those are disproportionally woman. The real gender ratio could be the same as the gender ratio of the industry overall.

In any case, with just 150 contributers it's hard to make any statistically significant statement.

Re: Rust 1.5

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a strong ETA, no. Everything about internals is basically waiting until after the HIR/MIR work lands, as it would end up changing a lot anyway, so that's where the focus is at the moment. That doesn't mean the _discussion_ about how it works has to stop in the meantime, though...

Well even a guesstimate would be nice :) I've been following Rust from sidelines before 1.0 and from my perspective there are advantages but I can also see a lot of pain in porting stuff and moving over and I right now the benefits don't outweigh the risk and cost for me - but having a fast build system (which implies incremental recompilation) along with a default package manager (which it already has) would be enou…

If you want a guess, I guess "in 2016".

Re: Rust 1.5

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, this isn't even unusual. Open source developers as a whole are 90% male or more; some older surveys found the number higher than 98%. http://readwrite.com/2013/12/11/open-source-diversity As a long-time member of the Rust community I am seeing this changing over time, but much more slowly than I'd like. Rust is a very friendly community; we have an actively-enforced code of conduct (which has been in place sin…

As a long time member of the Rust community (since the beginning of 2013), I don't see much improvement, if at all. I wonder why we have different perception of the issue.

I definitely know more women involved in Rust than I did a year ago [EDIT: in percentage terms, as well as absolute numbers], but this might just reflect my own awareness rather than any greater trend. I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence. Actual surveys of Rust developers/users would be useful.

Also, most of the people I know in the Rust community now are now "users" of the language, rather than people working on the compiler/platform itself. (This wasn't true for me a couple of years ago.) My impression is that the Rust community as a whole is growing and changing much faster than the compiler/internal developer population.

Re: Rust 1.5

#44
post #4

How are compile times now? The one barrier I had to using Rust for anything large was the awful compile times. Very happy to see the tooling improvements, though. Great work!

How long is "long"? What sort of time would we be talking about for 100KLOC projects?

Re: Rust 1.5

#45
post #23

Browsing the names of contributors, I was surprised at the lack of gender diversity. Four or five female contributors at the very most. Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?

I hope you are trolling. Would more women in tech be good? Of course! However there is some crazy SJW stuff going on at the moment in a lot of projects. People pushing for things like Master/Slave to be renamed to Leader/Follower. Wanting things like man (as in the man command on Linux) renamed to something non-gender-based. I mean fucking come on. I am all for a more inclusive environment but some things are just st…

Yeah the master/slave thing pisses me off. They are words in the dictionary used to describe something and that is all.

Re: Rust 1.5

#46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time member of the Rust community (since the beginning of 2013), I don't see much improvement, if at all. I wonder why we have different perception of the issue.

I definitely know more women involved in Rust than I did a year ago [EDIT: in percentage terms, as well as absolute numbers] , but this might just reflect my own awareness rather than any greater trend. I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence. Actual surveys of Rust developers/users would be useful. Also, most of the people I know in the Rust community now are now "users" of the language, rather than people working o…

Oh, I agree there are more women involved, but I attribute that to greater popularity of Rust. What I don't see is change in relative number, not absolute number.

Re: Rust 1.5

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a strong ETA, no. Everything about internals is basically waiting until after the HIR/MIR work lands, as it would end up changing a lot anyway, so that's where the focus is at the moment. That doesn't mean the _discussion_ about how it works has to stop in the meantime, though...

Well even a guesstimate would be nice :) I've been following Rust from sidelines before 1.0 and from my perspective there are advantages but I can also see a lot of pain in porting stuff and moving over and I right now the benefits don't outweigh the risk and cost for me - but having a fast build system (which implies incremental recompilation) along with a default package manager (which it already has) would be enou…

There's two components to this. I just asked the relevant people, they said "Six months is a safe guess, we hope sooner, we have ambitious plans, we'll see."

However, there's also something mentioned in this announcement: cargo-check. In terms of the "I'm building a project and I don't want my builds to be slow," I think that cargo-check might even be more important. cargo-check relies on an important insight: many times, when you're compiling, you don't actually care about producing a binary, you care that your code passes typechecking and other passes. cargo-check basically runs those things, and doesn't produce the final binary. Makes sense?

Re: Rust 1.5

#48
post #23

Browsing the names of contributors, I was surprised at the lack of gender diversity. Four or five female contributors at the very most. Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?

It is unfortunate, and it is a good question to ask why Rust is attracting so few female contributors.

To assume when asking that question that the project is misogynist is a bit of a stretch, however. It's worth checking the project's policies and behaviors, to make sure it isn't doing anything that provides some kind of bias, but simply starting out by claiming that Rust is "anti-female" goes a bit far.

A few things that I can think of off the top of my head:

Some of the prominent contributions from women don't show up in the list of contributors because they are not directly to the compiler and standard library which are what are tracked in this contributor list, but rather to the broader ecosystem. Julia Evans has written some good blog posts on writing an OS in Rust, that have inspired other people in this space: http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/. Emily Dunham does some excellent work on Rust infrastructure: http://edunham.net/2015/05/20/open_infrastructure.html There are of course many more that I'm not listing here, but the point is that the Rust community, and even the upstream project, consist of more than just the compiler and standard library, though those contributors are the ones that get credited in a release since that is what is being released.

Rust is still a nascent language; while it is starting to gain traction in the industry, it is not yet broadly adopted, and thus investing a lot of time and energy in joining the project is still a bit of a risk. People who have more social capital and more free time can afford to spend more of that on projects like Rust with a lot of potential but a higher amount of risk. Unfortunately, in our society men tend to have both more social capital, and more free time as domestic labor and child rearing is still seen as primarily women's work.

There are probably a large number of other factors at play. The Rust community that I have seen has been very supportive of women contributing, and has been doing a better job recently of outreach, but there is still probably more that can be done.

Can you provide any suggestions; any place you see the project structure, or contributors, being "anti-female", or any positive action that could be done to increase outreach or increase participation?

Re: Rust 1.5

#49
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not for Rust, would you write your app in C++ or Python/Ruby/JS?

Python (currently using), or Go. Add JS to that list as well, because I've done a little bit of work in Node, but that was before Coroutines (back in the days of yore when "callback hell" was a thing), so I wasn't nearly as excited at the time as I probably would be now.

Try Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org). Phoenix framework is awesome and working with it is a pleasure.

Re: Rust 1.5

#50
post #23

Browsing the names of contributors, I was surprised at the lack of gender diversity. Four or five female contributors at the very most. Rates of female participation below 5% - wow. Why is Rust lang so anti-female?

Having few female contributors isn't a sign that Rust is anti female. It could just be that females aren't that interested in Rust, or perhaps more likely that there just aren't as many female developers.

Honestly of all the engineers I've worked with, I think less than 5% have been female.

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