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Comment by hannibalhorn | Hacker News Reader

Go started out to address the problems of a particular large corporation with a gigantic C++/Python codebase, and was conceived by a small team of well respected industry experts.

Rust started out as the new generation engine of an open source browser, conceding that no existing language met its needs, and has been community driven since that point, often making breaking changes in pursuit of the ideal.

Go has indeed been very open to community input, but of the two, it seems clear that Rust is the bazaar, and Go is the cathedral, no? I'd love to hear how you arrived at a conclusion to the contrary.

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From the outside, Rust and Go were both originally developed by corporations eventually with community involvement. The credit line for Rust has been changed from the original Mozilla to the Rust Project Developers. Go has remained Google.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-packaging/pull/49/files

But I don't see this corporate history as at all indicative. By comparison, Unix was originally developed by Ma Bell whereas Lisp was developed by a community. My view is based more on the resulting languages rather than the process that got them there.

Again, though, this is from the out outside.

To be fair, Mozilla is a very different sort of corporation than Google. Notably the Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation which is a non-profit.

(As a disclaimer, I'm a biased ex-intern.)

Rust was created before Mozilla got interested in it: http://www.steveklabnik.com/history-of-rust/

For anyone else who gets confused by this empty-seeming page: it's a slideshow. The right arrow key moves through slides.

Rust was in development for 3 years before Mozilla's involvment.

I would also note that Rust's development model is a lot more open, Go doesn't even accept pull requests.

Go does accept pull requests, just not GitHub ones: https://golang.org/doc/contribute.html#Code_review

(I don't disagree with the premise though, Go does seem to be less community-driven than Rust; e.g. Rust has 3 mozilla employees in the top 10 contributors for the most recent release[0], where as Go has 9 Googlers in its top 10[1].)

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors?from=2...

[1]: https://rakyll.org/go18cls/

It also seems to require a CLA and a bunch of other barriers. Everyone's on Github - not accepting pull requests on there (without a CLA) limits the contributor pool.

The copyright for Go has been

  Copyright YYYY The Go Authors.

ever since its public release in 2009. Google only holds the copyrights for the subset of contributions to Go made by Google employees, but there's no Google credit in the sense you're describing.

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