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Comment by infamouscow | Hacker News Reader

The US government has a very long history projecting it's will on other countries. Under the guise of national security, what is stopping the US government from changing Rust to prevent it from working in Russia, Iran, or Canada? The scenario is somewhat hyperbolic, but the US and European centric nature of Rust gives people in less developed nations pause.

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How to change an opensource programming language to prevent it from working in a particular country?

> The scenario is somewhat hyperbolic, but the US and European centric nature of Rust gives people in less developed nations pause.

This point is correct with every semi-major programming languages (top 100 popular?), so I don't think it's just a Rust problem.

How would one change a programming language to not work in a country?

Even assuming that is possible, the answer is the same as any open source project: you’d have to convince the teams to make that decision. Nothing special there.

> what is stopping the US government from changing Rust to prevent it from working in Russia, Iran, or Canada?

Well, for one Rust is open source, so you could download the source code and comment out the country ban yourself?

Why would the US government care about Rust? And what could they possibly legislate to change it? Do you have a plausible scenario in mind?

A senator^Wcongressman asked some questions about Rust and its nightly toolchain whenever Facebook’s cryptocurrency was under scrutiny by regulators. A French government agency has a whole set of coding guidelines for Rust. The government of Quatar was using Rust before 1.0; haven’t heard much since, but I assume they’re still using it. A New Zealand firefighter company was using some Rust.

Programming languages are tools. Governments use tools. It shouldn’t be surprising that they may have an interest.

That said I find your parent comment also a bit silly for the other reasons you state.

They care deeply about software security and memory flaws (everyone should). If rust had an ISO standard, then it could be used in more sensitive military and aerospace systems.

https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

Also, when something is an ISO standard, then governments can't legislate that some countries may not be allowed to use it.

https://help.duo.com/s/article/7544?language=en_US

Something being an ISO standard has nothing to do with being able to send OFAC after you? Fundamentally the difference is providing a service vs an idea just existing in the ether. You can't sanction Rust, it's just an idea. You could tell rustup they can't allow downloads from IPs that match sanctioned countries.

If the US gov decides to project its will on your software project, an ISO standard is not going to help you at all. They will sabotage the ISO process, or force your hosting provider (GitHub) to remove your project or apply changes to it, or just kidnap your maintainers and beat them with wrenches until they comply[0].

If your threat model legitimately considers the US gov to be a hostile actor, you need far more than a piece of paper that claims what the behavior of your compiler is.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/538/

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