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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
- kowlo 6y agoI know Mozilla played a big part w.r.t Rust, but it's strange to see this on the front page... we had this 2 days ago https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-world/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl..., and now we have a low-effort blog post front-paging that is welcoming the foundation.
- ChrisSD 6y agoIndeed there were also announcements from Microsoft[0], Amazon[1] and Google[2], all of which were posted on the main thread. Are we going to have a new thread for each of them? [0]: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/microsoft-joins-rust-foundation/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/micro... [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/congratulations-rustaceans-on-the-creation-of-the-rust-foundation https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/congratulations-rust... [2]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/02/google-joins-rust-foundation.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/02/google-joins-rust-...
- Daho0n 6y agoAre you advocating deleting threads over letting votes sort them?
- kowlo 6y agoHN is moderated isn't it?
- pessimizer 6y agoThreads on the same subject are often deleted, conversations are moved between threads, and main thread links are changed to better ones. It's about cultivating the conversation, not democracy for democracy's sake.
- emptyparadise 6y agoI think Mozilla is a special case given Rust's history.
- rob74 6y agoMozilla also played a big part in this foundation being necessary after it laid off most of its employees involved in Rust last year. The foundation is a good idea of course, but they could have handled it better, e.g. setting up the foundation first, so that the Rust developers could transition to it without the disturbance and bad PR generated by the layoffs? It's not that Mozilla is so cash-strapped that it had to get rid of them immediately (at least not as far as I know)? Or was this the kind of drastic action some parents have to take in order to get their kids to finally move out?
- einpoklum 6y agoReminds me a bit of how Mozilla got rid of Mail&News, some years back.
- btown 6y agoA brief reminder that Mozilla paid its top executive, Mitchell Baker, $2.4m in 2018. http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
- rob74 6y agoYeah, (re)reading that reinforces my opinion that Rust is better off being supported by a foundation - provided of course that the foundation is better managed than Mozilla...
- xpe 6y agoThis also exists in the broader context of tremendous growth in CEO pay over recent decades. There are widespread claims that executive pay is inflated. In one sentence: > Importantly, rising CEO pay does not reflect rising value of skills, but rather CEOs’ use of their power to set their own pay. Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ I find these arguments persuasive.
- oblio 6y agoThat happens every time this is allowed. I can't remember the last time our Parliament voted to reduce their own salaries :-))
- detaro 6y agomain discussion re Rust Foundation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26067118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26067118
- frr149 6y agoWe reached peak hype.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoyawn
- yownie 6y agoWell, I guess we all wait for Mozilla to ruin Rust now as well.
- Jonnax 6y agoRust was started at Mozilla.
- Deukhoofd 6y agoThis comment confuses me. Mozilla is going to ruin Rust now? Not in the 10 years that it has been a part of Mozilla, but after it became independent?
- pratio 6y agoGlad i wasn't the only one.
- technics256 6y agoGive Mozilla credit where credit is due instead of reflexively throwing trite criticisms. Yes they have their fair share of problems, but we owe them a thanks for its foundations at Mozilla and their help in bringing it to where it is today.
- ChrisRR 6y agoYou didn't read the post then
- Shadonototro 6y agoThey congratulate themselves? Why no Firefox Foundation? Wasn't Mozilla already a non-profit Foundation? On its own, it is a great move for Rust, more independence, but this sounds more like a new title for marketing PR purposes than anything else.. hope i'm wrong, rust needs it EDIT: what makes posts reach #1 on HN?
- kowlo 6y agoIt seems superficial
- greatgib 6y agoThe Mozilla corp style usual bullshit. You click on the button that says: "Learn more about how we're different" And you arrive on the page that says that: << The board of directors is composed of 5 directors from our Founding member companies, AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, >> Please, tell me again how different you are? ...
- Deukhoofd 6y agoDifferent from the original structure where it was all Mozilla.
- nickelcitymario 6y ago> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulting to explain on HN. Point is, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. (I'm not arguing Rust isn't better. Nor that cutting your code base nearly in half isn't impressive. Simply that this single metric on their part seems like weak sauce.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- steveklabnik 6y agoThey tried to do it in C++ twice before the Rust. So what you’re asking for sorta kinda happened.
- nickelcitymario 6y agoI didn't know that! Thanks for that context, it makes their claim far more interesting in my books.
- professor_v 6y agoThey don't explicitly state that the rewrite is better? They just mention that they reduced the amount of code from 160,000 to 85,000 lines. Using competing teams for this purpose seems like a waste of money to me.
- tehbeard 6y agoLess of a waste of money than what Mozilla spends on CEO/middle management.
- swsieber 6y agoIt could very much be from the second system effect though. A rewrite in C++ from a competing team would provide a control for that. As many others have mentioned though, the real kicker is that they did attempt a rewrite twice in C++ aiming for the features of the rust one; those didn't work out.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoDidn't they lay off employees that worked on Rust projects like Servo a couple months ago? And now they do this?
- praveenperera 6y agoI've never seen the original introduction of Rust from Graydon Hoare before seeing the link in this post: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf The original vision for Rust sounds a lot like a typed Erlang without the BEAM.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI started following it when he first started working on it back then, but I actually lost (some) interest once it became more about the memory safety features. It's not that I don't think the borrow checker etc. stuff is really awesome. I just find the original concept very appealing and incremental. Essentially an OCaml for systems level programming. A sane C++. I feel like Rust is making its moves slowly into that territory, but that the memory safety pieces have made it more difficult, even if the long-term payoff is better. All that said, I'd like a job programming in Rust
- justin66 6y agoI'm just curious, feature-wise, what keeps OCaml from being an OCaml for systems level programming?
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI'm sure for some uses it would be fine. But typically the concern is garbage collection. Manual memory allocation and the ability to deal directly with pointers etc. is important for driver and OS development, as well as embedded systems work.
- barrkel 6y agoOCaml is a GC language. It does have a fairly direct translation into assembly though, and is not a pure functional language.
- Pelic4n 6y agoThe GC and the GIL.
- justsomeuser 6y agoIsn’t a million dollar yearly budget really low considering how rich those companies are? That’s like 4 full time engineers. Not even a 5 a side football team.
- the_duke 6y agoAmazon and Microsoft are building internal teams to work on the compiler, so the budget of the foundation is not necessarily representative of the total financial investment by these companies.
- skohan 6y agoI hope that Amazon and MS will not represent the majority of investment in Rust's development. The incentive structure for an independent foundation is favorable for a variety of reasons.
- bennyp101 6y agoI guess that depends on where the engineers are, and how much they are paid - I've never known anyone (in coding) to be paid > £100k (~$140k) - but then maybe I move in the wrong circles! So you could certainly get more than 4 engineers on board, plus some project managers etc
- neuromancer2701 6y agoWith 401k, healthcare, I have heard that a million bucks gets you 3 engineers. Or in the case of layoffs you get a million dollars worth of savings per year per 3 engineers laid off.
- bennyp101 6y agoYea, I guess if you are throwing healthcare etc in as well it can add up - and I guess US insurance costs are on the high end
- zimpenfish 6y ago
- xpe 6y agoTo put this in a slightly larger context, here are three articles that look at the history of open source foundations and compare them: https://opensource.com/business/16/2/bright-lines https://opensource.com/business/16/2/bright-lines https://towardsdatascience.com/the-unsung-heroes-of-modern-software-development-561fc4cb6850 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-unsung-heroes-of-modern-s... https://livablesoftware.com/study-open-source-foundations/ https://livablesoftware.com/study-open-source-foundations/
- rvz 6y agoThank you for this. While the announcements themselves are welcomed, a lot of detail of the actual structure of the foundation is missing or perhaps not clear. Something feels strange about the founding members of the Rust foundation. It looks like Rust is going to have a similar structure like the C++ committees or even the Linux Foundation (which Servo is now part of) given how big tech companies seems to have a wide presence in these technologies and these foundations which is fine for usage, but very worrying in terms of having seats at the board with the potential risk for them to drive that technology in their interests and we have no say about this. I feel these announcements have glossed over this important aspect.
- steveklabnik 6y agoA significant difference between the C++ committees and the Rust Foundation is that the RF has no technical decision making capacity. The language team is the sole governing body of the Rust language, and they are not a part of the foundation.
- Hnshadowbansvd 6y agoHow about pwa?
- devmunchies 6y agoI see the Rust Foundation being more important than the Mozilla Foundation in 5-10 years.
- rofrol 6y ago>Just last night I was thinking about how it was possible that, given the relative trends, Mozilla’s greater legacy might turn out to be Rust, not Firefox. John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1293227109738061826?lang=en https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1293227109738061826...