The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund

I think that both languages deserve to be evaluated on their technical merits, of which there are many. I would say they are both very well-designed languages that occupy different points in the design space and each have unique innovations of their own, and are worthy of the attention they get. I also think both languages have strong communities and good technical leadership.

What I'm frustrated about is a general pattern in online discourse of treating programming language adoption as a zero-sum game and pitting the communities against each other. This is nothing remotely new -- holy wars over tooling are just about as old as computing itself -- but Rust seems to have become right at the center of it in the last few years, and I think this is likely just a result of it becoming "mainstream" enough for people to care about it outside of a niche circle. I consider that a community issue with Rust, but probably an unavoidable one given the scale of the Internet.

The thing that feels different to me about Zig is that the language's leadership participates in the "holy war", which is different than what I have observed from Rust's leadership. It's one thing if random netizens are trash talking the "opposing team" like a sports fan, but I would expect people who are deeply involved in programming language design and representing their community to know better and behave better than that. It's surprising and disappointing to me; it drags down the overall quality of discourse and sets a bad example for the language communities.

Maybe my own perspective on this is skewed, perhaps I'm looking at Rust's past with rose-tinted glasses. But I think my experiences are comparable. From 2015-2020 I was primarily working with Swift and closely following that language's design and development, and the Rust community (which I was not involved in at all) felt like friendly neighbors. The two communities shared similar goals and had a lot of like-minded people, and because of that there was a lot of overlap and amicability between the communities. Both languages' teams were frequently comparing notes and copying features from one another.

Now I'm primarily working with Rust and closely following that languages' design and development, and it seems to me like the Zig community (which I am not involved with at all) should be on the same friendly terms for the same reasons, but the vibes I see from them are "this town isn't big enough for the two of us", and I'm bothered by that.

> I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying you've seen projects implemented in Rust go poorly? If so, I don't know what to say without any context, besides that I don't think there's a "one size fits all" for programming languages.

Or are you saying big companies' contributions towards the Rust project itself have gone poorly? I don't really know what to say about that either. I have felt that the direction the project has taken over the past few years has represented me and addressed my needs well, so I have confidence in their technical direction and leadership for the time being.

> Here's how that works out in practice, from today:

> Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it.

This is a good example of conversational flow in an environment where people are not reprimanded for referring to others with pronouns that accord to the speaker's personal worldview. One person says "he", another person says "she", and everyone tolerates this difference of expression whether they agree with it or not.

Essentially it's the most politically neutral stance on pronouns, as implemented in an everyday conversation.

>But who is "they"?

The person you're replying to.

>What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"?

There is a stated and auctioned stance the rust foundation poses, and they are saying they align with that. At this point if you can see their point the communication fault is yours.

>Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways

No it doesn't.

>If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment

I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.

> > But who is "they"?

You used "they" several times, so I took a certain usage to mean "Rust", and I was asking who specifically "Rust" entails. Who defines the "Rust beliefs"?

> > Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways

"Suggests", as in, "it is likely implied that" (emphasis on "likely"), though I should've been more clear.

> I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.

The primary topic is politics.

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I find issue with the framing of "taking sides". I hear it and think of fragmentation for the sake of fragmentation. There is a distinct difference in saying "I side with Rust" and "I agree with Rust", the latter being reducible to "Rust believes [a belief]" and "I believe [the same belief]". The former can be used to mean the latter, but I choose to focus on the likely implication.

A bit of a tilted take.

Zig's BDFL was an early major supporter of Rust. It was Rust's core maintainer group who excluded him and warred against his language. The leaders decided any "memory unsafe" language was against "consensus"; first C, then Zig. They even posted on Twitter, calling Zig a "step backwards". This Language Supremacism was even worse in conferences and in private.

Today, you can see a lot of the core ex-leaders still sniping at at other language and even successful OSS projects based in those languages. The Zig community has its faults but Rust takes the cake for relentless gamesmanship.