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Comment by crazypython | Hacker News Reader

The board's vote seems to be heavily biased in favor of large corporations, with half the seats for them, 2 for the community, and 3 for "project areas." Contrast this with the governance of GCC, which has all of them as community members or project areas.

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The goal of the foundation is to work as a bridge between the Rust teams and the corporate world (e.g. sponsorship, licensing, etc). As the blog post notes, the actual development of the language is fully open and is comprised of RFCs and the like which allow anyone to contribute. It's the core team who oversee this process, not the foundation.

In short the foundation works for Rust, not the other way around.

The foundation works for its board members. We can hope that the board members will work for Rust, but the structure of the board does nothing to check their power and influence.

On the other hand, I do recognize that the board members are the ones bringing the funding to the table; maybe this was the best way to maximize their contributions. If the board's interests align well with the Rust community's interests, then this could turn out fine, at least at first.

Rust as a language is great already as it is, it doesn’t need more features to be much better than C++ (compilation speed may be an exception...). So I guess my take is that corporate adoption is the most important thing to happen with it at this stage.

Nobody expects the board of directors to influence the technical work being done. The skepticism is about decisions that have political consequences.

This [1] was from the keynote of the latest RustConf. While there's surely plenty of good the Rust project will manage to do regardless of these decisions, I can't help but think there's a small disconnect between "owning" the political role of Rust, and then surrendering half the board to the usual suspects.

[1] https://youtu.be/IwPRu5FhfIQ?t=1659

I can't find much in the way of Rust credentials for the rest of the members but, looking at their profiles, Nell (MS's representative) used to manage crates.io while at Mozilla, and Lars (Google) used to manage the Servo team. While they are technically representing corporate interests, they're also heavily invested in the community.

That doesn't mean much long term. If they disagree with the corporations they represent, they will be replaced.

Bobby (the Mozilla rep) was also heavily involved with Servo and Rust-in-Firefox, see e.g. https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html

> Contrast this with the governance of GCC

The equivalent of that would be the Rust teams[0] as far as I can tell, which will still be the governing body of all development, and won't be replaced by the Rust foundation.

[0]: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance

It makes sense that large corporations would be interested in Rust given its current capabilities and future potential.

Amazon, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all have a vested interest in Rust succeeding since they are all deeply invested in high performance software, the majority of which is written in C and C++.

The undefined behavior semantics in C and C++ trade safe handling of undefined behavior for high performance. The result is high performance code that is difficult for developers to reason about and vulnerable from a security standpoint.

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/213 gives great insights into how undefined behavior in C and C++ can cause problems.

Rust is becoming an excellent replacement and hopefully will continue to succeed to enter all the niches that C and C++ currently occupy.

GCC is one compiler project among others, ironically for your example most funding comes from corporations as well, with Red-Hat being a major contributor.

If you can get MS, Google and Amazon to all agree on an approach, odds are it's probably the right approach.

It's a business association, like the Linux Foundation. It's very much for the corporate members, like the Linux Foundation.

Doesn't look like you can donate to Rust as an individual.

Too bad.

This is true right this moment, yes. That may change in the future.

This is a business association, for the benefit of member businesses. It's a non-profit, but not a charity.

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