Arm Joins the Rust Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Arm Joins the Rust Foundation

eenewseurope.com

168 pointsfork-bomber19 comments

I've started learning rust recently by reading "Programming rust 2nd ed" (great book btw). Rust is a pretty amazing language, I haven't touched low level languages like C or assembly since college, I have 0 professional experience with them. Because of the Rust borrow checker and how the language guides you to writing safe code I think almost anyone with cs knowledge that learns this language is capable of writing safe low level code. It's basically training wheels for those of us that have been using gc'ed languages our entire lives. Also because of the language's ergonomic features I often find myself more productive writing rust than java or c#.

Anyway, glad to see rust gaining more and more adoption and support.

One of the main justifications for inventing the Rust Foundation was to have a good place to own Rust's trademarks, which were previously owned by Mozilla.

The foundation is now nine months old, but I don't see any announcement on its website saying that the trademarks have been transferred.

The Rust website [1] says that the Rust trademark is still owned by the Mozilla Foundation.

The README in Rust's git repository [2] says it's owned by the Rust Foundation.

I am distinctly unimpressed by the foundation's communication skills so far.

[1] https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/media-guide [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust

I can't speak to the foundation's performance or communication, but the purpose is more than holding its trademarks; it's for holding any/all assets for the organization. I thought the main catalyst for the rust foundation was there being many people/organizations which wanted to donate/fund development of rust but no means for handling the money (responsibly).

Well AFAICT the foundation isn't funding any developers at the moment, either. I remember from the discussions that was always a far-off goal. Though it probably does make it easier to coordinate donating hardware resources.

The foundation is funding oncall support staff for crates.io which was a much more urgent need than funding more devs.

Amazon, Microsoft, Huawei, Google and Futurewei are all now employing a good chunk of the devs to work on it full time.

I believe the first major funding by the Rust Foundation was hiring Ferrous to help develop and maintain crates.io:

https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-10-18-crates-io-...

Well, that may mean that none of the Rust Foundation sponsors have managed to pull off an insider gambit to obtain a trademark licensing deal which unduly advantages them! :) (e.g. control over a canonical domain, official conference, etc.)

However, it can also mean that nobody's minding the store, allowing some company to establish a mark in practice which will be difficult to take back later. (This has happened multiple times with ASF projects: CouchDB and CouchBase, Mesos and Mesosphere...)

The last minutes they have published was for the May meeting [0], and there have even been talk about making the release of the minutes faster in some of the ones that are published.

[0]: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/meetings/

It would be nice if the title would capitalize ARM.

I was wondering if this is about ARM, the Army or even a human limb :)

FWIW, the company title at present (wasn't always the case) is 'Arm' and not 'ARM'.

https://www.arm.com/company/policies/trademarks/guidelines-t...

ARM is the architecture and Arm (as of 2017) is the company. It's unclear why the article goes back and forth on this.

The architecture name is also Arm. A lot of people never got the memo about the recapitalization of the company name in 2017, including, apparently, the journalist who wrote this article. The text which is a quote from the company spokesman gets the capitalization right, because it will have been cut-and-pasted from an email from him; all the uses of ARM are in journo-written text.

The company's name is 'Arm' though.

Arm is a British company and their name comes from their "Acorn RISC Machine".

In British English, they tend to only capitalize the first letter of an acronym if it's read as a word. So for example the British Broadcasting Corporation is the "BBC" (pronounced B-B-C), but the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is "Nato", and the US National Aeronautics and Space Agency is "Nasa".

At this point the formal name of the company is "Arm Ltd" even though their processors still go by "ARM".

This is incorrect. The casing has nothing to do with being British. Until some time ago, it was ARM proper, whilst still being British. Although, the name was an initialism of 'Acorn RISC Machines', they later went by just the name, without any connotation to its origins.

Some time ago, the management decided that the branding wasn't hip enough, and went for a rebranding (website, social media etc.), with lower case arm used in documents and as logo. But when used as a noun, they use Arm instead.

Source: I used to work there when this happened.

I've learned something today :) Thanks. Then the linked article has it wrong, though.

Huge

Just imagine how nonsensical this headline would have looked to someone in the 19th century.

The only reason that it might appear more nonsensical than anything else on the front page right now is because we happened to have named these things after words which would have existed that far back. ("Slorgilling the greunigs" means nothing to us today, but it obviously means nothing; "orange the secondary flatcup" is just as meaningless, but forces you to actually read it because it almost sounds like it should make sense. Likewise, "Rust on ARM" isn't actually using words that meant something that far back, but it at least looks like it could, where, say, "A Python JIT Compiler" is mostly words that make even less sense using their historical meanings or lack thereof)

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