At some point, we all have to have a serious conversation about Amazon's involvement in Rust. It's been far too long without me saying this.
Amazon now has:
* Lang team co-lead
* Compiler team co-lead
* decided to not have a Rust Foundation ED, meaning Chair has outsized power in the Foundation
they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
the first three though, are undefinable. they're just facts. And now they want to actually take Amazon's principles and claim that they're Rust's.
So, what do we do? Is this okay?
I want big companies to be involved in Rust. I don't want Amazon to go away!
I *do* want them to start playing nice instead of playing badly.
I've tried to get this message across in private. They just don't care.
In the beginning, Rust did have one sole patron: Mozilla. Everyone was uncomfortable with that arrangement, including Mozilla.
We spent years trying to get away from this situation. It had tons of negative effects.
Why are we regressing here?
I know @mjasay left Amazon recently, but note what this article is: it's an article by someone from Amazon talking about how two other people at Amazon are writing Amazon's tenets as Rust's, and that's why Rust is so beloved.
Rust is not beloved because of Amazon. Sorry.
Now, I should also say this: lots of hard workin Rustaceans at Amazon. I like most of you. You're doing good work, and trying to keep doing the right thing.
This isn't about individuals. This is about structure. This is about leadership.
(also, since I pointed him out: the above goes for @mjasay too. Not trying to say he's a terrible person here. I don't think that; I actually respect him quite a bit.)
ah see this is what i mean by "doing things behind the scenes to marginalize the core team"
note that this was also retweeted by the lang team co-lead
a lot of people seem to think the core team is irrelevant, yet somehow worth attacking
the reality is this: the core team *has* become less relevant over time. because the core team used to be the only leadership in the rust project. but that wasn't okay.
we delegated out real, actual leadership powers to the subteams. im on the core team. i don't get to veto language team decisions. that's their role. and i'm glad they have it!
a lot of what core does at this point is to be "the buck stops here." we handle all of the work that's not explicitly delegated to another team.
that work is *never* sexy, and often not able to be made public.
the role of governance has to change as the reality changes. and we've been intensely wondering about what that means for rust governance for like, a long time, actually!
we can have real, upfront conversations about that, and figure out what we as a community want things to be, *or* we can
1. decide to do the work of other teams 2. complain about them in private and then in public
there's been a lot of #2 going on
there is also worse stuff! still not going to talk about that though.
point is: there are bigger and deeper issues here.
to elaborate on #3: The structural issue here is that the foundation decided to forgo extending the interim ED contract while looking for a new ED; this means that the foundation currently does not have one, and we don't know when a new one is coming. 1/2
During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board. 2/2
Oh and one thing I should say too: suggesting that core doesn’t do anything during the same year we managed the implosion of Mozilla and the creation of the foundation is incredibly disrespectful to those on core who did all of that intense work.
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Super glad that this is finally open source, so I can sing my co-workers' praises in public and not private 😀
In short, Hubris and Humility are a brand new OS and debugger for embedded systems. 100% Rust.
There's a lot of things that are really, really cool here, far too many for Twitter. I've done a lot of work on our build system, which is one of those cool things: it is layered on top of Cargo to build the entire image.
This essay is basically like "wow we have all of these production techniques to make copies of works of art. historically that was never practical. now it is easy. what does that mean for art"
it is a pretty short essay. i've always said programmers in general should read it.
but in some sense, nfts represent an attempt to be anti-this. it is trivial to be a "rightclicker" (lol). but they're trying to go back to this pre-industrial mode of art production
Some people have this experience and do exactly as I and @Wraithan do; “dang I wish I had the compiler to help me here, now I gotta do all this work”
Some people experience what Rust does and go “wow this compiler is constantly holding me back”
I suspect a lot of discussions around things like “productivity” are conflated with things like “have existing experience with tests/types” and “prefers runtime/compile time errors” and various other things
you know how i've had like, seriously declining mental health lately?
it is incredibly difficult, personally, to put a lot of volunteer work, heart, and soul, into doing something for a project, and then to have others malign it
i can handle heat from random people. that's fine. people can disagree with things. that's also fine!
but some of the stuff being said and done has just... it's tremendously painful. i've cried a lot. some actual friendships destroyed at this point
all i can say about 1password is that it gets my highest possible praise for a product, which is that i use it every day, it works perfectly, and i never need to think about it except when nerds get really upset about it online for whatever reason it is this time
the enlightened orange website user, on a tab about facebook: "if you're not paying, YOU'RE the product"
on a tab about 1password: $3/month is too much, use this free oss program with terrible ux instead
"ugh, an online vault that Just Works across every device you own no matter the OS? don't use that! just put this file in your dropbox and make sure to configure all the various apps to use that and if it gets out of date just manually re-sync it"
PSA: I plan on blogging about this, but haven’t yet, but semver is now a dtolnay crate. There’s basically nobody else I’d have given this too. Very glad to see what he’s doing with it