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The Rust people firmly believe in specs and are working on one (most of the activity is currently in Ferrocene). On the other hand, they fully appreciate that w

The Rust people firmly believe in specs and are working on one (most of the activity is currently in Ferrocene). On the other hand, they fully appreciate that writing a good spec is very hard and takes time, while a bad spec can do lots of damage to the ecosystem.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
The Rust foundation should be the organization heading the standardization efforts, not some shady GmbH. But looking at https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ I see a content-devoid site that holds nothing but passive-aggressive demands for money. That's about as far away from "firmly believing" as possible given the circumstance.
- raphlinus 5y ago
  The Foundation is a recent development. The efforts by Ferrous to make Rust more suitable for safety-critical work predate the creation of the Foundation by quite some time; there was quite a bit of work done under the "sealed Rust" banner before that was rebranded as Ferrocene. Good specs don't emerge from thin air (though I suspect that many bad specs emerge through spontaneous generation), and the people who work on them deserve to be funded. While I'm not claiming the process the Rust community has is perfect, it is explicitly designed to be sustainable, and I think it's right to be proud of the collaboration between different companies, large and small, and also academia; Ralf Jung's work in particular is foundational and he well earned his recent PhD for it.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    No offense, but your explanation reads like something a politician would produce when trying to explain why that airport missed deadlines while over budget and all that remains in abundance is a bunch of shell companies.
    - wtetzner 5y ago
      Do you have some sort of an SLA with Rust, stating that all of this work should already have been completed? It's a relatively new project, and will take time to catch up to existing languages in many areas. Neither C or C++ started with a standard.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  The head of that “shady GmbH” is on the Core team, and is one of the Core Team’s board representatives for the Foundation. Regardless, it is a misunderstanding of Rust’s governance to suggest that the Foundation would lead a standardization effort; the Language Team, part of the Project, not the Foundation, is in charge of the definition of the language.
mjw1007 5y ago
I've been expecting some kind of announcement from the lang team saying something about how the third party Ferrocene / sealed Rust project fits in with the official project and its documentation. Do you know if there's been one that I've missed? Some of the work involved in producing a specification will involve making decisions about corner cases which aren't currently nailed down. What I'm wondering is whether the Ferrocene people are going to be effectively authorised to make those decisions.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  I mean, it’s always been there ever since it was announced. See https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/ https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/ which talks about working with upstream, and the thanks to two Lang team members at the end.
  - mjw1007 5y ago
    There is, to my mind, a significant difference between a blog post from the lang team and a blog post from Ferrous systems which thanks the lang team for their feedback.
nextaccountic 5y ago
Do you know if Ferrocene will be closed source or proprietary in any way? This is very worrying: https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-pitch/#funding https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-pitch/#fund... And clashes with the entire development of the Rust language so far.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

The Rust foundation should be the organization heading the standardization efforts, not some shady GmbH. But looking at https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ I see a content-devoid site that holds nothing but passive-aggressive demands for money. That's about as far away from "firmly believing" as possible given the circumstance.

raphlinus 5y ago
The Foundation is a recent development. The efforts by Ferrous to make Rust more suitable for safety-critical work predate the creation of the Foundation by quite some time; there was quite a bit of work done under the "sealed Rust" banner before that was rebranded as Ferrocene. Good specs don't emerge from thin air (though I suspect that many bad specs emerge through spontaneous generation), and the people who work on them deserve to be funded. While I'm not claiming the process the Rust community has is perfect, it is explicitly designed to be sustainable, and I think it's right to be proud of the collaboration between different companies, large and small, and also academia; Ralf Jung's work in particular is foundational and he well earned his recent PhD for it.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  No offense, but your explanation reads like something a politician would produce when trying to explain why that airport missed deadlines while over budget and all that remains in abundance is a bunch of shell companies.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    Do you have some sort of an SLA with Rust, stating that all of this work should already have been completed? It's a relatively new project, and will take time to catch up to existing languages in many areas. Neither C or C++ started with a standard.
steveklabnik 5y ago
The head of that “shady GmbH” is on the Core team, and is one of the Core Team’s board representatives for the Foundation. Regardless, it is a misunderstanding of Rust’s governance to suggest that the Foundation would lead a standardization effort; the Language Team, part of the Project, not the Foundation, is in charge of the definition of the language.

mjw1007 5y ago

I've been expecting some kind of announcement from the lang team saying something about how the third party Ferrocene / sealed Rust project fits in with the official project and its documentation. Do you know if there's been one that I've missed? Some of the work involved in producing a specification will involve making decisions about corner cases which aren't currently nailed down. What I'm wondering is whether the Ferrocene people are going to be effectively authorised to make those decisions.

steveklabnik 5y ago
I mean, it’s always been there ever since it was announced. See https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/ https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-plan/ which talks about working with upstream, and the thanks to two Lang team members at the end.
- mjw1007 5y ago
  There is, to my mind, a significant difference between a blog post from the lang team and a blog post from Ferrous systems which thanks the lang team for their feedback.

nextaccountic 5y ago

Do you know if Ferrocene will be closed source or proprietary in any way? This is very worrying: https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-pitch/#funding https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-pitch/#fund... And clashes with the entire development of the Rust language so far.