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> It is true that the folks working on Rust are focused on "advancing the language," yes. I don't see why it would be any other way? That wasn't the argument.

> It is true that the folks working on Rust are focused on "advancing the language," yes. I don't see why it would be any other way? That wasn't the argument. What's problematic is that Rust developers are focused on their language above anything else, to the detriment of the primary product they're developing. When the product - a web browser to stand against Chrome - is much more important than yet another programming language. It's about obsessing on your tools and being in love with a programming language; I call it "thinking with your fingers".

steveklabnik 6y ago
> to the detriment of the primary product they're developing I guess this is the core of it. It is hard for me to understand why you'd think people working on a language would have "the primary product" be something other than the language. There isn't even a single coherent other project to be associated with. Why would "a browser" be special here? It’s even in the name: the Rust developers. We develop Rust. Do you fault the C standards body for working on C? Or the Ruby core team for working on Ruby? What language do the developers of the language consider something other than the language as their primary product? Now, of course, as a tool maker, you have to make sure the tool is fit for purpose. You want to enable the people who are working on projects like a browser to be able to do their job. But that's their job, not our job. It seems like you're suggesting that the primary job of Rust developers is to improve Firefox, and it's very confusing to me why you'd say that, when nobody would say that about any other language. Or at least, I've never come across that sentiment before.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Maybe we're really talking past another, but for example, last week's announcement for Servo's new home page reads > The Servo Project is excited to announce that it has found a new home with the Linux Foundation. Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. This is clearly written by someone who sees Servo as a showcase for Rust above anything else rather than what tf it is, such as a state-of-the-art rendering engine. But the developers addressed as readers, such as me, care about the state and coverage of the actual layout engine, CSS parsing/matching, rendering and rendering targets, font handling, and the like. I'm not the only one bringing this up; when the announcement was discussed [1], there were similar sentiments. For me, a programming language is a means to an end for creating machine code, not an end in itself. This focus (and Mozilla and developers walking away from it) also hints at Servo not being all that useful (or incomplete?) for actual rendering; we don't really know. Anyway, the take away for me is that diving into Servo and Rust is probably not worth my time investment. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25125325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25125325
  - damnyou 6y ago
    > Anyway, the take away for me is that diving into Servo and Rust is probably not worth my time investment. You're the best judge of your time, but making a claim about Servo and then, in the last sentence of your post, broadening it to all of Rust, is a bit odd. Servo's not even in production, unlike plenty of other Rust code.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Yeah, I think we are. I think the issue here is that this post makes sense to me, but it's about Servo and/or Mozilla. But your initial post was complaining about "the Rust developers." These are two (or three) effectively disjoint sets of people. I think that's where we got off the rails. If you had said "Mozilla" in your post, I would still disagree, but for completely different reasons. Complaining about a "focus" on a team of ~20ish people in an organization of 1500 people doesn't make a ton of sense to me. And I'm still not clear why you're drawing conclusions about Rust generally from one single project, that's not even its most popular or widely used exemplar project.

steveklabnik 6y ago

> to the detriment of the primary product they're developing I guess this is the core of it. It is hard for me to understand why you'd think people working on a language would have "the primary product" be something other than the language. There isn't even a single coherent other project to be associated with. Why would "a browser" be special here? It’s even in the name: the Rust developers. We develop Rust. Do you fault the C standards body for working on C? Or the Ruby core team for working on Ruby? What language do the developers of the language consider something other than the language as their primary product? Now, of course, as a tool maker, you have to make sure the tool is fit for purpose. You want to enable the people who are working on projects like a browser to be able to do their job. But that's their job, not our job. It seems like you're suggesting that the primary job of Rust developers is to improve Firefox, and it's very confusing to me why you'd say that, when nobody would say that about any other language. Or at least, I've never come across that sentiment before.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Maybe we're really talking past another, but for example, last week's announcement for Servo's new home page reads > The Servo Project is excited to announce that it has found a new home with the Linux Foundation. Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. This is clearly written by someone who sees Servo as a showcase for Rust above anything else rather than what tf it is, such as a state-of-the-art rendering engine. But the developers addressed as readers, such as me, care about the state and coverage of the actual layout engine, CSS parsing/matching, rendering and rendering targets, font handling, and the like. I'm not the only one bringing this up; when the announcement was discussed [1], there were similar sentiments. For me, a programming language is a means to an end for creating machine code, not an end in itself. This focus (and Mozilla and developers walking away from it) also hints at Servo not being all that useful (or incomplete?) for actual rendering; we don't really know. Anyway, the take away for me is that diving into Servo and Rust is probably not worth my time investment. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25125325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25125325
- damnyou 6y ago
  > Anyway, the take away for me is that diving into Servo and Rust is probably not worth my time investment. You're the best judge of your time, but making a claim about Servo and then, in the last sentence of your post, broadening it to all of Rust, is a bit odd. Servo's not even in production, unlike plenty of other Rust code.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Yeah, I think we are. I think the issue here is that this post makes sense to me, but it's about Servo and/or Mozilla. But your initial post was complaining about "the Rust developers." These are two (or three) effectively disjoint sets of people. I think that's where we got off the rails. If you had said "Mozilla" in your post, I would still disagree, but for completely different reasons. Complaining about a "focus" on a team of ~20ish people in an organization of 1500 people doesn't make a ton of sense to me. And I'm still not clear why you're drawing conclusions about Rust generally from one single project, that's not even its most popular or widely used exemplar project.