I read this a couple of times and I can't tell how they are sponsoring the Rust Project. Apparently Rust uses some AWS services, are they now getting these for free, is that the sponsorship?
"We’re thrilled that AWS, which the Rust project has used for years, is helping to sponsor Rust’s infrastructure. This sponsorship enables Rust to sustainably host infrastructure on AWS to ship compiler artifacts, provide crates.io crate downloads, and house automation required to glue all our processes together. These services span a myriad of AWS offerings from CloudFront to EC2 to S3. Diversifying the sponsorship of the Rust project is also critical to its long-term success, and we’re excited that AWS is directly aiding this goal." https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-promotional-cred...
* https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/which-ci-platform-should-r...
* https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/update-on-the-ci-investiga...
The rust devs recompile a huge chunk of the entire rust ecosystem to make sure new compiler versions don't break things.
I can't imagine something like this being even close to feasible in the C++ ecosystem; there is too little standardization of build tooling, too much brittle/broken code.
Still it's not cheap and Amazon is paying, bless their hearts and excess compute capacity when it's not Christmas.
That being said, there is nothing preventing something similar with C++.
In fact, that's pretty much what Linux distributions and BSDs do when upgrading the compiler, see for example https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=240629
PS. The comment on the reddit thread is from one of the co-authors of the blog announcing the sponsorship.
> ps – AWS credits are available for other open source projects!
it sounds like it