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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, Crab will almost certainly not replace Rust, but that is not the goal.

I see it as: there's a finite amount of people who choose to dedicate their unpaid free time contributing to making Rust better (working on fixing bugs, new features, etc.)

This seems like fragmentation which basically will slow down progress. Now, obviously the people who choose to dedicate their free time to open source software are entitled to do whatever they want with it. I don't know the details of what part of what leadership is doing what that equates to "being a meanie" and I don't know who is "being dramatic" and who isn't.

All I know is, I'm grateful for their contributions and wish everybody could get along. This is kind of "not a good thing" for progress when you look at it from a delivery perspective.

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You're making a huge assumption with the "unpaid free time" part of this. A lot of Rust development is driven by corporations who are directly paying engineers to work on it, and the rust foundation has a lot of money coming in via donations (literally millions).

Some of the rust political decisions are concerning though. I can see the companies giving that money switching to someone else to avoid that politics. Time will tell, first the replacement needs to stick around for a while and prove to be a viable fork, which is hard without the donations.

When did a language fork work without new goals?

Jenkins forked Hudson years ago. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. Many linux distributions are forks of some other.

I can't think of any language, but the idea that a fork can work has a long successful history. (And a large history of failure)

I know about many successful fork. But forking a language (like including the compiler and the lang spec), never seen that work out.

C forked Algo. (and many others) ADA forked Pascal (modula? - another fork of Pascal). C++ forked C and Simula. D forked C++.

Objective C forked C and gcc. (eventually folded back)

Do any of that languages had some Hollywood level bullshit about language name ?

Mozilla isn't open source first fundation(?), forking of their stuff is urgent.

> A lot of Rust development is driven by corporations who are directly paying engineers to work on it, and the rust foundation has a lot of money coming in via donations (literally millions).

Then why are people set up about the trademark/copyright/license issue?

>Then why are people set up about the trademark/copyright/license issue?

For the same reason people go ballistic over myriad other trivial things (e.g. Twitter), they find drama entertaining and outrage is effortless and consequence free (for them).

I'm not thrilled with the trademark changes myself but forking because they posted a draft and asked for comment is absolutely dumb as heck and not productive. It just adds to the drama.

it’s odd how these types of people seem to be drawn to being open source contributors

it’s like their personality draws them to it? it seems more prominent in this community

On the other hand it could become a place to test ideas and port the winners over to rust. It’s not necessarily negative.

I think this essentially happened with XEmacs. It's been a while (since the 90's), but I recall that they had a different architecture and more advanced font support. I believe the latter was folded back into Emacs eventually.

Sorta like EGCS was for GCC?

Only here the whole language was also forked.

So more like if C++ PLUS g++ where forked. Then C++ already had many compiler implementations before I was even born, and Rust has one serious one (and several other with explicitly different goals).

io.js (node.js fork) seems like a parallel. It split off to get away from Joyents advisory board that was slowing down development and the trademark issues around Node. It was more performant in the short term with faster development cycles. Once the issues with Joyent were worked out it was merged back into mainline node.

Different political issues here so whether it gets ported back into Rust or becomes what Rust was (or just fades away) is still TBD but who knows?

Well, Joyent spun off Node as a separate org, and io.js's developers pretty much ran the dev side of the new Node.js org. So it really didn't disappear so much as replaced the upstream for the most part.

I think a lot of Rust's governance and leadership has left some poor impressions in a lot of ways and the Trademark licensing is just the step too far for a lot of people. I don't think the goal is to necessarily destroy rust, but definitely change the direction somewhat dramatically.

This assumes it doesn't slow down velocity/introduce time wasted with bureaucracy/trying to keep 2 separate codebases in sync/timelines/initiatives, etc.

Not to downplay any of your points, but as a counterpoint, I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim. Perhaps I'm only looking at short-term gains though and not long-term fragmentation

I believe the various BSDs would be another example. There have always been folks who argue that fragmentation/lack of developers/etc would kill them. Not yet, fortunately.

> Not to downplay any of your points, but as a counterpoint, I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim.

On the contrary. Emergence on neovim had a positive impact on vim speed of development, and Bram's attitude to new features (vim terminal, async, etc) softened a lot. He has also become more open to contributions from others. Even though vim-9 and neovim are on divergent paths they are both better because of the competition.

Even if we agree that there is a fixed finite amount of people, mind that not everybody will work with everybody wit h the same process.

Having only a single organisation might prevent some people from contributing, who in a different environment might submit ideas and do some work.

The results then may influence the other project as well.

Human interaction is complicated ...

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