12 ms·

Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik Are Joining the Rust Core Team

423 points by wycats 12y ago

losvedir 12y ago
Congrats! I actually didn't know they weren't already part of the core team. What exactly does this change entail, then? The rust community is lucky to have these two. I recently went through the rust guide and it's terrific! And as a happy rubygems user, I'm glad to see crates following a similar path.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Thanks! (especially re: the guide, which is my baby) > What exactly does this change entail, then? The core team is listed at https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Note-core-team https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Note-core-team . Basically, like most projects, it just adds weight to our opinions in decisions that are made, and that we're sure to be involved in making those decisions. In general, we try to get rough consensus for major decisions from the team + community.
  - baq 12y ago
    steve, does that mean there's a chance you'll get a contract extension to keep working on rust, assuming you'd like to?
    - steveklabnik 12y ago
      I don't want to talk too much about these details yet, but rest assured that I will be quite heavily involved in Rust regardless of what shakes out. :)
nardi 12y ago
Thus continues Yehuda's quest to join every cool core team on the Internet. :) See also: Rails, Bundler, Ember.js, jQuery, W3C TAG, TC39.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  Yeah, I wonder how he manages to juggle all of that. What's your secret wycats? (I'm not really expecting there to be a single secret).
  - wycats 12y ago
    For what it's worth, a big part of this is slowly winding down earlier commitments over time. I joined TAG a couple years ago, and decided not to run again this year because I had largely achieved my original goals of changing the composition and mission of the TAG, and others can carry the torch forward. I also retired from the Rails team this year after a somewhat-long period of inactivity (from day-to-day decisionmaking) for similar reasons. The closest I can get to a single "secret" is aggressively delegating. What I mean by this is delegating before you feel comfortable delegating. The only way I know of to get everything done that I want to get done is to set the vision for something, do some initial implementation work, and find people who share the vision to help as early as possible. The primary reason I end up working on so many things is that things are way more connected than you might expect, and the full picture of something like Ember involves both day-to-day work on Ember and advocacy around a whole host of related technologies. I'm very grateful for the number of groups that have welcomed my participation. I got involved in Rust largely because it was the shortest path to a low-overhead, non-crashy agent for Skylight, even counting the work we had to do to keep up with ongoing development over the past year. When getting involved in a technology so early, I tend to get really invested, and try to find holes that I know how to fill and fill them. That's what happened with Cargo and a whole bunch of other areas in Rust.
    - adamnemecek 12y ago
      Thanks, good to know. So I guess the real secret is being able to attract people to delegate work to.
    - 674266966223478 12y ago
      How would you respond to those who see you merely as somebody who just hops on the bandwagon, so to speak, quite frequently? Whether this perception is right or wrong, there are a number of prominent individuals within the open source community who are widely seen as rapidly jumping between trendy or hyped projects as they arise, to benefit from the exposure that this involvement can bring. I'm not passing any judgment, mind you. I personally don't care which projects you choose to get involved with. However, I do know that other people have noticed certain trends around how certain open source developers move among projects, and this does negatively affect the impressions these people have of these open source developers and the projects they get involved with.
tomdale 12y ago
Congratulations Yehuda and Steve! We've been using Rust in production for awhile now, specifically because of its combo of native speed and memory safety[1]. This bending of traditional tradeoffs has let us implement features that would have been otherwise impossible. Interfacing with Ruby via its C APIs, we are able to do some pretty crazy stuff, like sample memory allocations in production with imperceptible overhead[2]. Most importantly, we can do it without fear of segfaulting our customers' servers. It's really great to see people other than low-level bitbangers being added to the core team. In this case, having a production user and someone focused on new users demonstrates the Rust team's commitment to building a functionally diverse community. Lastly, I think opening up the core team to a wide coalition of companies is the right way to build a robust, long-lived open source project. Yehuda talked a little bit about this in his Indie OSS talk[2]. There are several "pathogens" that can affect open source projects, and the more diverse the distribution of power, the more likely you are to be immune to these pathogens. 1: http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/ http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-... 2: http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/ http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/ 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqXU4o24Hkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqXU4o24Hkg
- bojo 12y ago
  Could you define "low-level bitbangers"? It sounds kind of derogatory, but maybe I am reading it wrong.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    Low level in term of programming abstraction, not any kind of hierarchy i.e. banging your head against bits and bytes rather than monads and functors
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    It's a sort of nickname derived from a technique for communication on very cheap microcontrollers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-banging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-banging
- 12y ago
pjmlp 12y ago
Congratulations!
grandalf 12y ago
Anyone care to mention the best reasons to start using/learning Rust? There must be a lot with these guys joining the team.
- wycats 12y ago
  I replied to this a bit on the other HN thread on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8741987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8741987 TL;DR embedding small libraries with high-performance or low-memory requirements into programs written in high-level languages.
  - bsaul 12y ago
    Since you know a lot about web frameworks : do you see rust becoming a good language for building a modern web framework anytime soon ?
    - hayksaakian 12y ago
      from the parent answer i would presume he thinks it's more useful as a "bottleneck fixer" in high level web frameworks. (when the bottleneck is the language of the framework). For example, you might implement a few parts of your rails app with rust to make them faster.
    - wycats 12y ago
      One of the nice things about Rust is that it provides a lot of high-level abstraction capability in a way that doesn't impose any cost on the abstraction. This means that, in theory, one could make a pretty good web framework in Rust that would be both quite fast and ergonomic. That said, writing those abstractions will take time, so we'll probably see lower-level HTTP libraries, followed by Express-style abstractions, followed further on by full-stack solutions like Rails. The earlier parts of the stack are coming along quite well, so give it a few years and I think we'll have a pretty good story to tell. In the meantime, you can use Rust today very effectively as a language that you embed inside a high-level language, and I think a sizable chunk of the Rust community will use Rust for those kinds of embedding use-cases in perpetuity.
paulmalenke 12y ago
Congratulations to both of you!
sergiotapia 12y ago
How will this affect Yehuda's involvement with Ember? I'm kinda scared he will jump ship and leave it in the air. :/
- wycats 12y ago
  Most definitely not. Ember (and its ecosystem) and Rust are the two open source projects that are currently consuming most of my time. I have easily spent as much time on the planning for Ember 2.0, HTMLBars, and Service Side Rendering as I have on Cargo and Rust over the past six months or so. Also, both Ember and Rust are critical for my business (Skylight), and keeping them both strong and effective are key to my business interests ;)
  - sergiotapia 12y ago
    Thank you sincerely, Ember has been amazing and it's great to hear you don't plan to drop it.
  - balloot 12y ago
    Good to hear - building a project on Ember now and it (Ember) is an absolute joy to work with. Keep it going!
  - yonibot 12y ago
    This is reassuring - I'm happy to know that you've bet your personal business on it, and really glad that they've got you and Steve on board. Looking forward to great things from Rust, and excited to get more involved!
yesimahuman 12y ago
Nice! As a reluctant Go developer, I look at rust with envy and excitement. I am very eager to see this project progress and it seems like they've got some great people on it.
- getsat 12y ago
  I share your envy and excitement. I'm looking forward to dumping Go in favor of Rust once it's competitive in terms of libraries/stdlib. I've been building some big stuff in Go recently (mostly around financial market simulation) and the language shortcomings have hurt a lot. I've been using Go since January 2013 as my primary language, but everything I've seen of and tried with Rust is amazing.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    What are the shortcomings?
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      From what I gather, lack of user defined generics is primary reason, followed by the loose typing in interfaces. I'm not an expert in Go, so feel free to correct me there. Additionally, IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an argument that it is wrong turn to make.
      - kibwen 12y ago
        > IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO > regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an > argument that it is wrong turn to make. This is a mistaken conception, as Rust has had something approximating generics since the very beginning (though they have changed drastically since the outset), and traits have always been explicit rather than implicit (and it was pcwalton who initially conceived traits, not nmatsakis (and traits as well have changed drastically since their inception (the bottom line is that pretty much everything about Rust has changed drastically since its inception))).
zampano 12y ago
Congratulations! The two of you easily became two of my biggest role models after I was introduced to web development; its been a pleasure to follow your general trajectories. Thanks for showing us what is possible when you're willing to actually do something!
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  <3
juanmnl 12y ago
Congrats Yehuda! You are a true inspiration, and i just want to thank you for everything you've done and i'm shure you'll take rust to another level. Congrats to Steve too. 2015, the year of rust(?) :P
deadprogram 12y ago
Very exciting!

423 points by wycats 12y ago

Congrats! I actually didn't know they weren't already part of the core team. What exactly does this change entail, then? The rust community is lucky to have these two. I recently went through the rust guide and it's terrific! And as a happy rubygems user, I'm glad to see crates following a similar path.

steveklabnik 12y ago
Thanks! (especially re: the guide, which is my baby) > What exactly does this change entail, then? The core team is listed at https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Note-core-team https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Note-core-team . Basically, like most projects, it just adds weight to our opinions in decisions that are made, and that we're sure to be involved in making those decisions. In general, we try to get rough consensus for major decisions from the team + community.
- baq 12y ago
  steve, does that mean there's a chance you'll get a contract extension to keep working on rust, assuming you'd like to?
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    I don't want to talk too much about these details yet, but rest assured that I will be quite heavily involved in Rust regardless of what shakes out. :)

nardi 12y ago

Thus continues Yehuda's quest to join every cool core team on the Internet. :) See also: Rails, Bundler, Ember.js, jQuery, W3C TAG, TC39.

adamnemecek 12y ago
Yeah, I wonder how he manages to juggle all of that. What's your secret wycats? (I'm not really expecting there to be a single secret).
- wycats 12y ago
  For what it's worth, a big part of this is slowly winding down earlier commitments over time. I joined TAG a couple years ago, and decided not to run again this year because I had largely achieved my original goals of changing the composition and mission of the TAG, and others can carry the torch forward. I also retired from the Rails team this year after a somewhat-long period of inactivity (from day-to-day decisionmaking) for similar reasons. The closest I can get to a single "secret" is aggressively delegating. What I mean by this is delegating before you feel comfortable delegating. The only way I know of to get everything done that I want to get done is to set the vision for something, do some initial implementation work, and find people who share the vision to help as early as possible. The primary reason I end up working on so many things is that things are way more connected than you might expect, and the full picture of something like Ember involves both day-to-day work on Ember and advocacy around a whole host of related technologies. I'm very grateful for the number of groups that have welcomed my participation. I got involved in Rust largely because it was the shortest path to a low-overhead, non-crashy agent for Skylight, even counting the work we had to do to keep up with ongoing development over the past year. When getting involved in a technology so early, I tend to get really invested, and try to find holes that I know how to fill and fill them. That's what happened with Cargo and a whole bunch of other areas in Rust.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    Thanks, good to know. So I guess the real secret is being able to attract people to delegate work to.
  - 674266966223478 12y ago
    How would you respond to those who see you merely as somebody who just hops on the bandwagon, so to speak, quite frequently? Whether this perception is right or wrong, there are a number of prominent individuals within the open source community who are widely seen as rapidly jumping between trendy or hyped projects as they arise, to benefit from the exposure that this involvement can bring. I'm not passing any judgment, mind you. I personally don't care which projects you choose to get involved with. However, I do know that other people have noticed certain trends around how certain open source developers move among projects, and this does negatively affect the impressions these people have of these open source developers and the projects they get involved with.

tomdale 12y ago

Congratulations Yehuda and Steve! We've been using Rust in production for awhile now, specifically because of its combo of native speed and memory safety[1]. This bending of traditional tradeoffs has let us implement features that would have been otherwise impossible. Interfacing with Ruby via its C APIs, we are able to do some pretty crazy stuff, like sample memory allocations in production with imperceptible overhead[2]. Most importantly, we can do it without fear of segfaulting our customers' servers. It's really great to see people other than low-level bitbangers being added to the core team. In this case, having a production user and someone focused on new users demonstrates the Rust team's commitment to building a functionally diverse community. Lastly, I think opening up the core team to a wide coalition of companies is the right way to build a robust, long-lived open source project. Yehuda talked a little bit about this in his Indie OSS talk[2]. There are several "pathogens" that can affect open source projects, and the more diverse the distribution of power, the more likely you are to be immune to these pathogens. 1: http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-native-gems-with-rust/ http://blog.skylight.io/bending-the-curve-writing-safe-fast-... 2: http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/ http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/ 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqXU4o24Hkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqXU4o24Hkg

bojo 12y ago
Could you define "low-level bitbangers"? It sounds kind of derogatory, but maybe I am reading it wrong.
- NhanH 12y ago
  Low level in term of programming abstraction, not any kind of hierarchy i.e. banging your head against bits and bytes rather than monads and functors
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  It's a sort of nickname derived from a technique for communication on very cheap microcontrollers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-banging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-banging
12y ago

pjmlp 12y ago

Congratulations!

grandalf 12y ago

Anyone care to mention the best reasons to start using/learning Rust? There must be a lot with these guys joining the team.

wycats 12y ago
I replied to this a bit on the other HN thread on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8741987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8741987 TL;DR embedding small libraries with high-performance or low-memory requirements into programs written in high-level languages.
- bsaul 12y ago
  Since you know a lot about web frameworks : do you see rust becoming a good language for building a modern web framework anytime soon ?
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    from the parent answer i would presume he thinks it's more useful as a "bottleneck fixer" in high level web frameworks. (when the bottleneck is the language of the framework). For example, you might implement a few parts of your rails app with rust to make them faster.
  - wycats 12y ago
    One of the nice things about Rust is that it provides a lot of high-level abstraction capability in a way that doesn't impose any cost on the abstraction. This means that, in theory, one could make a pretty good web framework in Rust that would be both quite fast and ergonomic. That said, writing those abstractions will take time, so we'll probably see lower-level HTTP libraries, followed by Express-style abstractions, followed further on by full-stack solutions like Rails. The earlier parts of the stack are coming along quite well, so give it a few years and I think we'll have a pretty good story to tell. In the meantime, you can use Rust today very effectively as a language that you embed inside a high-level language, and I think a sizable chunk of the Rust community will use Rust for those kinds of embedding use-cases in perpetuity.

paulmalenke 12y ago

Congratulations to both of you!

sergiotapia 12y ago

How will this affect Yehuda's involvement with Ember? I'm kinda scared he will jump ship and leave it in the air. :/

wycats 12y ago
Most definitely not. Ember (and its ecosystem) and Rust are the two open source projects that are currently consuming most of my time. I have easily spent as much time on the planning for Ember 2.0, HTMLBars, and Service Side Rendering as I have on Cargo and Rust over the past six months or so. Also, both Ember and Rust are critical for my business (Skylight), and keeping them both strong and effective are key to my business interests ;)
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  Thank you sincerely, Ember has been amazing and it's great to hear you don't plan to drop it.
- balloot 12y ago
  Good to hear - building a project on Ember now and it (Ember) is an absolute joy to work with. Keep it going!
- yonibot 12y ago
  This is reassuring - I'm happy to know that you've bet your personal business on it, and really glad that they've got you and Steve on board. Looking forward to great things from Rust, and excited to get more involved!

yesimahuman 12y ago

Nice! As a reluctant Go developer, I look at rust with envy and excitement. I am very eager to see this project progress and it seems like they've got some great people on it.

getsat 12y ago
I share your envy and excitement. I'm looking forward to dumping Go in favor of Rust once it's competitive in terms of libraries/stdlib. I've been building some big stuff in Go recently (mostly around financial market simulation) and the language shortcomings have hurt a lot. I've been using Go since January 2013 as my primary language, but everything I've seen of and tried with Rust is amazing.
- Kiro 12y ago
  What are the shortcomings?
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    From what I gather, lack of user defined generics is primary reason, followed by the loose typing in interfaces. I'm not an expert in Go, so feel free to correct me there. Additionally, IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an argument that it is wrong turn to make.
    - kibwen 12y ago
      > IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO > regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an > argument that it is wrong turn to make. This is a mistaken conception, as Rust has had something approximating generics since the very beginning (though they have changed drastically since the outset), and traits have always been explicit rather than implicit (and it was pcwalton who initially conceived traits, not nmatsakis (and traits as well have changed drastically since their inception (the bottom line is that pretty much everything about Rust has changed drastically since its inception))).

zampano 12y ago

Congratulations! The two of you easily became two of my biggest role models after I was introduced to web development; its been a pleasure to follow your general trajectories. Thanks for showing us what is possible when you're willing to actually do something!

steveklabnik 12y ago
<3

juanmnl 12y ago

Congrats Yehuda! You are a true inspiration, and i just want to thank you for everything you've done and i'm shure you'll take rust to another level. Congrats to Steve too. 2015, the year of rust(?) :P

deadprogram 12y ago

Very exciting!