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> Rust is a major advancement in industrial programming languages due in large part to its success in bridging the gap between low-level systems programming and

> Rust is a major advancement in industrial programming languages due in large part to its success in bridging the gap between low-level systems programming and high-level application programming So glad to see this sentiment echoed somewhere outside my own head/conversations. Rust is a game changer, it brings something novel (ownership/borrowing, research-grade type system) to systems programming, and it brings great features for high level programming (type inference, strict control, high level abstraction support, "zero-cost" abstractions), and is basically a paragon of good open-source development in the open. On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla, with so much less resources than other companies, and a demonstrated interest in making software that's good for everyone.

svrtknst 8y ago
> On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla IIRC it's open-source with a fairly wide set of contributors, with Mozilla being a major one, rather than Mozilla being the "owners" of Rust. Not arguing your point, and there's a chance I'm awfully wrong, but as I recall it, Mozilla are more the champions of the language rather than the owner of it. Regardless, it's a really neat language
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  That’s correct; we operate on consensus, and about a hundred people are involved in Rust governance. Only about six are employees of Mozilla.
  - hardwaresofton 8y ago
    TIL - to what extent does Mozilla still sponsor rust? Looking at the governance docs[0], there's no mention of Mozilla anywhere at all. This taken with the fact there are less than 10 people in a hundred from mozilla makes it pretty clear that rust has come a long way from being a mozilla research project (which I guess should have been obvious to me as well). What is the extent of support from mozilla? I can't find a list of other corporate sponsors? [0]: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance https://www.rust-lang.org/governance
    - steveklabnik 8y ago
      Mozilla pays for those people to work on Rust full time; they hire individuals for short-term contracts for specific work; they pay the CI and hosting bills. They also provide legal support. Some other companies do sponsor work at times as well. A recent hot topic of discussion is “does a Rust foundation make sense”, there are good arguments for and against. We’ll see. Oh, and note that that number is people who are decision makers in the project; about 120~150 distinct people contribute to each six-week release. We’ve had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that’s only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn’t produce a commit.
      - floofy222 8y ago
        > We’ve had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that’s only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn’t produce a commit. To put this into more context: a lot of the code shipped with the Rust toolchain does not live in rust-lang/rust. Some parts of the standard library (HashMap, HashSet, C FFI, intrinsics, etc.) are used as dependencies. All of the tools (the linter, language server, rustfmt, rustup, cargo, etc.) are dependencies. Many compiler components like miri (constant evaluator), chalk (type queries), polonius (borrow checking), etc. are also dependencies. The Cranelift code generation backend can be dynamically used and does not live in rust-lang/rust, etc. Then there is the RFC repository, and probably other things. Counting contributors for such a distributed infrastructure isn't easy, but the number of contributors to rust-lang/rust isn't super meaningful. One might be able to do better by finding commits to rust-lang/rust that update "Rust" submodules (e.g. not LLVM), and adding the contributors to those repos from the last update. One might also want to find commits that update versions of rust-lang/rust dependencies, and for those that live in the rust project (or that have dependencies there), count the contributors from the last version, etc. The Rust project has seen significant modularization over the last couple of years, and the more modular it gets, the less meaningful "contributors to rust-lang/rust" becomes, and the less accurate the "Thanks!" pages of each release become.
        8y ago

svrtknst 8y ago

> On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla IIRC it's open-source with a fairly wide set of contributors, with Mozilla being a major one, rather than Mozilla being the "owners" of Rust. Not arguing your point, and there's a chance I'm awfully wrong, but as I recall it, Mozilla are more the champions of the language rather than the owner of it. Regardless, it's a really neat language

steveklabnik 8y ago
That’s correct; we operate on consensus, and about a hundred people are involved in Rust governance. Only about six are employees of Mozilla.
- hardwaresofton 8y ago
  TIL - to what extent does Mozilla still sponsor rust? Looking at the governance docs[0], there's no mention of Mozilla anywhere at all. This taken with the fact there are less than 10 people in a hundred from mozilla makes it pretty clear that rust has come a long way from being a mozilla research project (which I guess should have been obvious to me as well). What is the extent of support from mozilla? I can't find a list of other corporate sponsors? [0]: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance https://www.rust-lang.org/governance
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    Mozilla pays for those people to work on Rust full time; they hire individuals for short-term contracts for specific work; they pay the CI and hosting bills. They also provide legal support. Some other companies do sponsor work at times as well. A recent hot topic of discussion is “does a Rust foundation make sense”, there are good arguments for and against. We’ll see. Oh, and note that that number is people who are decision makers in the project; about 120~150 distinct people contribute to each six-week release. We’ve had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that’s only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn’t produce a commit.
    - floofy222 8y ago
      > We’ve had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that’s only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn’t produce a commit. To put this into more context: a lot of the code shipped with the Rust toolchain does not live in rust-lang/rust. Some parts of the standard library (HashMap, HashSet, C FFI, intrinsics, etc.) are used as dependencies. All of the tools (the linter, language server, rustfmt, rustup, cargo, etc.) are dependencies. Many compiler components like miri (constant evaluator), chalk (type queries), polonius (borrow checking), etc. are also dependencies. The Cranelift code generation backend can be dynamically used and does not live in rust-lang/rust, etc. Then there is the RFC repository, and probably other things. Counting contributors for such a distributed infrastructure isn't easy, but the number of contributors to rust-lang/rust isn't super meaningful. One might be able to do better by finding commits to rust-lang/rust that update "Rust" submodules (e.g. not LLVM), and adding the contributors to those repos from the last update. One might also want to find commits that update versions of rust-lang/rust dependencies, and for those that live in the rust project (or that have dependencies there), count the contributors from the last version, etc. The Rust project has seen significant modularization over the last couple of years, and the more modular it gets, the less meaningful "contributors to rust-lang/rust" becomes, and the less accurate the "Thanks!" pages of each release become.
      - 8y ago