David Tolnay on the "RustConf Keynote Fiasco"

The dangle is this sharing of X with the world. If whatever they were writing was private, nobody would have cared, and they'd have known that enough not to bother dangling it.

I'll give you an example of my impression of their comment. You ask your child to clean their room when you leave for work. When you come back, you find them having not cleaned it.

In retaliation, you say "I had spoken to the baker to make you your favourite cake for this weekend, now I'm going to call them and ask them to no longer make it".

The cake is "part of the public domain" of whatever thing they were working on, because if they were working on a private codebase nobody would care if they wrote it in D or E or G.

Read what you may of it. To deal with emotionally manipulative people in our lives, we've learnt to identify cues like this one. There's a reason why when angry the best advice is to bite one's tongue.

It’s not as though giving a talk implies any particularly strong endorsement by the community at large that the subject is going to pan out. And if the talk is just about “whatever the speaker is working on”, then there is absolutely no implied endorsement of what they end up talking about.

I would say that David Tolnay himself confirmes that in the linked Gist:

    I expressed forceful skepticism that the compile-time introspection work, which I had been passively following with great interest, would achieve a state that would be suitable for a RustConf keynote in time for 2023 RustConf, for lack of adequate lang team iteration (neither for the Rust Foundation grant selection, nor conference presentation) to land well with the RustConf audience.

Never saw this part of the conversation and hope no one took my words to mean I felt that. I only expressed regret that he (a Project member and maintainer of one of the more critical packages) gave up on cargo wich I surmised by him saying that he did work for buck/bazel but didn't do anything for cargo but dumped the binary on us.

Relevant section:

"Someone else is always auditing the code and will save me from anything bad in a macro before it would ever run on my machines." (At one point serde_derive ran an untrusted binary for over 4 weeks across 12 releases before almost anyone became aware. This was plain-as-day code in the crate root; I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years.)

Reason 214 for not having macros in your language: reduce drama

Dramas in Python and C++ communities also had similar side effects on the people that were involved, and withdraw their contributions.

You're literally victim blaming here.

Surprised I didn't see more in Java over the decades but I suspect that's because those old Sun/Oracle guys would prefer to go fishing than argue about who is more woke or whose agenda is more insidious.