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Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees. This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base a

Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees. This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and develop it into different directions. Both code and organization. And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others strife.

epolanski 3y ago
I share the spirit. OSS is all about forking. My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way he prefers for whatever reasons.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.
  - layer8 3y ago
    It’s not the language that aims to be that, it’s people. And different people have different aims.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I've followed enough of the Rust debate that I'm suspicious of those people that have lost sight of that particular goal.
  - arp242 3y ago
    If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else. Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.
      - arp242 3y ago
        I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions then don't do radical things. Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.
        toyg 3y ago
        ... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also mention GNOME.
        arp242 3y ago
        I don't think they really did much for their parent project though? They're just forks that are more successful than the parent, but that's a different thing. My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.
        toyg 3y ago
        I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly from code pushed to the forked versions.
        jacquesm 3y ago
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Why not? Competition if anything breeds more innovation. I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      Because the working programmers are busy enough already. Have them part attention at Rust vs. Crab and a part of them will likely just leave. All this drama and the fork likely seem extremely important to the parties involved but everyone else just wishes they would get along. As a working dev I want one Rust.
      - epolanski 3y ago
        If some drama is the reason why people may leave Rust, I guess engineering is not this person's or team's strength.
        pdimitar 3y ago
        Agreed, it's just that I seriously don't want to pay attention whether I should keep using Rust or switch to Crab. I simply don't want to care, I got plenty of work on my plate already. ...You know?
  - cookieperson 3y ago
    Doesn't look like the leadership is interested in stability so, maybe it's a good time to consider alternatives?
scns 3y ago
This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.
- dijit 3y ago
  Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom". That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system then obtaining in Communist China. The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in February 1957, is: "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Wow. In context that’s really dark, given where Mao’s leadership led those leaders of arts and sciences.
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    And the reason for saying that was to get people to feel like it was ok to be critical of Mao, with the result being "reeducation" and death for any who did.
  - iudqnolq 3y ago
    Shortly afterwards everyone who took advantage of the invitation was punished. There's two theories - It was a trap - Mao didn't expect serious criticism, was surprised, and lashed out
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      If the session took place I would go for the latter. Many of those dictator types actually think they are that good at what they are doing.
  - coffeeblack 3y ago
jevgeni 3y ago
This is not about code, it's about standards. As long as I don't have to have 2 Rusts to deal with, I'm fine with this, but right now at least the branding isn't supporting that.
- reaperman 3y ago
  If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust, then that’s where I’m putting my energy too. I believe they’re hugely responsible for most of the adoption of Rust and have no doubt they’d see continued success anywhere they choose.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    > If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust But they quite dislike this fork, don’t they?
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Ashley Williams comments were sympathetic but unsupportive. I haven’t heard anything from the others. Based on Ashley’s comments, I think the HN community has really overreacted to this story and treated it as something much bigger than it is. Im not sure there’s anyone at all notable involved with the “crab” fork. I haven’t looked into it much though, someone may correct me. Overall though, I’m not sure this is worthy of our attention.
      - EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
        That's a very short-sighted way to read the room. Doubt has been sown at a critical Rust adoption juncture, and major damage has occurred, and the stench will not simply blow away or only stick with the forkers, it's damaged RUST and The Official Rust People need to wake up and smell some burning coffee, or the dreams of this unique lego just evaporating while you claim it's all a tempest in a teapot. Note: I have no horse in this race other than using Rust and wanting to have a stable unique lego for all things from baremetal to high level, which is here and being threatened by all this nonsense. HN teapot tempest = something Official Folks better heed, or pay the price for... problem is, this strike is damaging the company, and management thinks it's no big deal...
exitb 3y ago
Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of long term software development is absolutely astounding, especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your dirty laundry out of the public eye if you really care about Rust.
  - Nanana909 3y ago
    I agree with you on the “realities of long term software development”. But I think I believe there is a fundamental difference between the standard realities on a successful enterprise project and the language itself. That is, the latter needs to balance the needs of a much, much wider array of customers (all rust compiler users) versus the former with a more specific target user base. This introduces different requirements. Changes are far, far more likely to be permanent for example. Which means that the discussion around decisions needs to be different.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      If you can't resolve that conflict of interest then you have absolutely no business being near the seats of power for a project such as Rust. Rust needs to be perceived as a safe bet, not as the next Ruby, if it is to achieve the goals that have been put forward by those that advocated for the language's adoption.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
alkonaut 3y ago
The downside to open source is the confusion around what's the latest, what's "most official", what's compatible with what. In 99% of cases having one project however bad it is, means less confusion and more stability than several (It's funny and scary how this is exactly the one and only argument for dictatorship). For the good of the project long term, evolution through selection might be best. But it's certainly not best for the short to medium term if talent is split, and it's not great for users to have to wonder which fork to use.
taneq 3y ago
Yep, it’s amazing how fast “it’s oss, if you don’t like it just fork it and make your own version” turns into “you forked it?! angery”
kaba0 3y ago
If there is no real weight behind a fork than it is either useless, or might even be a detriment to the whole by fracturing the ecosystem. I feel this is the latter kind.
porcoda 3y ago
I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple groups without having to know how all of the different variants interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95 language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific extensions and implementation choices. I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that builds them. But at least establish a common language in which to build that diverse ecosystem. It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized things in the first place!)
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  >> "How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" There’s a fresh new level of hell I hope I don’t get sent to for my sins when my time is up.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another, Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique subset/superset and edge cases.
- cgh 3y ago
  Pascal (eg Turbo Pascal) vs Super Pascal vs Object Pascal also springs to mind.
smarnach 3y ago
The thing is, nothing is developed in a different direction here. The fork simply merges upstream changes, and has no current plans of revert introducing any technical differences. It's a spoon, not a fork. I think it's an important aspect of free software that it can be forked. That doesn't me we need to celebrate all forks. Some are great. Some cause more harm than good. But most are simply irrelevant. This one appears to be in that last category.
- coffeeblack 3y ago
  What made you think that you "need" to "celebrate" anything? Who told you that? Weird choice of words.
zeteo 3y ago
Maybe it will develop into a true fork as you say. Right now it seems rather aimed towards influencing the committee in favor of a different type of monoculture.
topspin 3y ago
Agreed. I have no respect for the concern trolling about whatever hypothetical damage this supposedly does. If the Rust 'community' is so fragile that this toy fork is an actual problem then there is something fundamentally broken about Rust and its community.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

epolanski 3y ago

I share the spirit. OSS is all about forking. My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way he prefers for whatever reasons.

jacquesm 3y ago
Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.
- layer8 3y ago
  It’s not the language that aims to be that, it’s people. And different people have different aims.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I've followed enough of the Rust debate that I'm suspicious of those people that have lost sight of that particular goal.
- arp242 3y ago
  If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else. Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.
    - arp242 3y ago
      I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions then don't do radical things. Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.
      - toyg 3y ago
        ... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also mention GNOME.
        arp242 3y ago
        I don't think they really did much for their parent project though? They're just forks that are more successful than the parent, but that's a different thing. My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.
        toyg 3y ago
        I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly from code pushed to the forked versions.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- epolanski 3y ago
  Why not? Competition if anything breeds more innovation. I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Because the working programmers are busy enough already. Have them part attention at Rust vs. Crab and a part of them will likely just leave. All this drama and the fork likely seem extremely important to the parties involved but everyone else just wishes they would get along. As a working dev I want one Rust.
    - epolanski 3y ago
      If some drama is the reason why people may leave Rust, I guess engineering is not this person's or team's strength.
      - pdimitar 3y ago
        Agreed, it's just that I seriously don't want to pay attention whether I should keep using Rust or switch to Crab. I simply don't want to care, I got plenty of work on my plate already. ...You know?
- cookieperson 3y ago
  Doesn't look like the leadership is interested in stability so, maybe it's a good time to consider alternatives?

scns 3y ago

This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.

dijit 3y ago
Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom". That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system then obtaining in Communist China. The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in February 1957, is: "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
- reaperman 3y ago
  Wow. In context that’s really dark, given where Mao’s leadership led those leaders of arts and sciences.
- tomohawk 3y ago
  And the reason for saying that was to get people to feel like it was ok to be critical of Mao, with the result being "reeducation" and death for any who did.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  Shortly afterwards everyone who took advantage of the invitation was punished. There's two theories - It was a trap - Mao didn't expect serious criticism, was surprised, and lashed out
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    If the session took place I would go for the latter. Many of those dictator types actually think they are that good at what they are doing.
- coffeeblack 3y ago

jevgeni 3y ago

This is not about code, it's about standards. As long as I don't have to have 2 Rusts to deal with, I'm fine with this, but right now at least the branding isn't supporting that.

reaperman 3y ago
If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust, then that’s where I’m putting my energy too. I believe they’re hugely responsible for most of the adoption of Rust and have no doubt they’d see continued success anywhere they choose.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust But they quite dislike this fork, don’t they?
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Ashley Williams comments were sympathetic but unsupportive. I haven’t heard anything from the others. Based on Ashley’s comments, I think the HN community has really overreacted to this story and treated it as something much bigger than it is. Im not sure there’s anyone at all notable involved with the “crab” fork. I haven’t looked into it much though, someone may correct me. Overall though, I’m not sure this is worthy of our attention.
    - EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
      That's a very short-sighted way to read the room. Doubt has been sown at a critical Rust adoption juncture, and major damage has occurred, and the stench will not simply blow away or only stick with the forkers, it's damaged RUST and The Official Rust People need to wake up and smell some burning coffee, or the dreams of this unique lego just evaporating while you claim it's all a tempest in a teapot. Note: I have no horse in this race other than using Rust and wanting to have a stable unique lego for all things from baremetal to high level, which is here and being threatened by all this nonsense. HN teapot tempest = something Official Folks better heed, or pay the price for... problem is, this strike is damaging the company, and management thinks it's no big deal...

exitb 3y ago

Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.

jacquesm 3y ago
Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of long term software development is absolutely astounding, especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your dirty laundry out of the public eye if you really care about Rust.
- Nanana909 3y ago
  I agree with you on the “realities of long term software development”. But I think I believe there is a fundamental difference between the standard realities on a successful enterprise project and the language itself. That is, the latter needs to balance the needs of a much, much wider array of customers (all rust compiler users) versus the former with a more specific target user base. This introduces different requirements. Changes are far, far more likely to be permanent for example. Which means that the discussion around decisions needs to be different.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    If you can't resolve that conflict of interest then you have absolutely no business being near the seats of power for a project such as Rust. Rust needs to be perceived as a safe bet, not as the next Ruby, if it is to achieve the goals that have been put forward by those that advocated for the language's adoption.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago

alkonaut 3y ago

The downside to open source is the confusion around what's the latest, what's "most official", what's compatible with what. In 99% of cases having one project however bad it is, means less confusion and more stability than several (It's funny and scary how this is exactly the one and only argument for dictatorship). For the good of the project long term, evolution through selection might be best. But it's certainly not best for the short to medium term if talent is split, and it's not great for users to have to wonder which fork to use.

taneq 3y ago

Yep, it’s amazing how fast “it’s oss, if you don’t like it just fork it and make your own version” turns into “you forked it?! angery”

kaba0 3y ago

If there is no real weight behind a fork than it is either useless, or might even be a detriment to the whole by fracturing the ecosystem. I feel this is the latter kind.

porcoda 3y ago

I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple groups without having to know how all of the different variants interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95 language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific extensions and implementation choices. I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that builds them. But at least establish a common language in which to build that diverse ecosystem. It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized things in the first place!)

andrewstuart 3y ago
>> "How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" There’s a fresh new level of hell I hope I don’t get sent to for my sins when my time is up.
mschuster91 3y ago
> It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another, Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique subset/superset and edge cases.
cgh 3y ago
Pascal (eg Turbo Pascal) vs Super Pascal vs Object Pascal also springs to mind.

smarnach 3y ago

The thing is, nothing is developed in a different direction here. The fork simply merges upstream changes, and has no current plans of revert introducing any technical differences. It's a spoon, not a fork. I think it's an important aspect of free software that it can be forked. That doesn't me we need to celebrate all forks. Some are great. Some cause more harm than good. But most are simply irrelevant. This one appears to be in that last category.

coffeeblack 3y ago
What made you think that you "need" to "celebrate" anything? Who told you that? Weird choice of words.

zeteo 3y ago

Maybe it will develop into a true fork as you say. Right now it seems rather aimed towards influencing the committee in favor of a different type of monoculture.

topspin 3y ago

Agreed. I have no respect for the concern trolling about whatever hypothetical damage this supposedly does. If the Rust 'community' is so fragile that this toy fork is an actual problem then there is something fundamentally broken about Rust and its community.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]