Microsoft's $1M Vote of Confidence in Rust's Future | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's $1M Vote of Confidence in Rust's Future

thenewstack.io

58 pointsweinzierl40 comments

WOW, a whole entire million dollars? Microsoft is so generous! How much revenue do they pull every year again?

That’s a drop in a bucket.

You mean from M$'s bucket. It's something for the foundation.

Can’t just throw money at problems

This is why matching campaigns are often done, to see the market desire for something and matching that. Since no arbitrary amount will satisfy people that believe you have more, but this is the closest thing to it.

In any case this wasnt a matching one, just an analysis on what the Rust Foundation could make do with

It can surely grow if no issues occur. One of the worst things to do would be to drop some ridiculous sum on a project and expect it all to be used properly.

“All” I want from Mycroft is first-class rust support in Visual Studio. The rumors that they’ve been working on it are several years old now.

I used to spend my entire life inside Visual Studio, but my life has mostly moved to VS Code, where the Rust Analyzer extension provides a really nice experience. Granted, on rare occasions the extension fails for some byzantine reason, and language support in VS has always been rock solid, but would it really be that much better than life within VSCode? I'm not sure, but maybe it would?

What differentiates this from any other editor with a Rust plugin? Visual Studio is an entirely different animal.

I guess that’s my point though. What is desirable about Visual Studio itself these days that one would need Rust support in it? I don’t see it as having much of an edge, especially in areas where tight Windows integration isn’t necessary.

IMO VS proper has a lot of great features, especially around runtime analysis, profiling, debugging, etc. I’m pretty annoyed that they only offer the full-fledged version for Windows. I’m an Emacs user on Linux, Mac, and windows, but I will drop into VS at times when command-line debugging isn’t satisfactory. That said, I haven’t sorted out DAP yet.

Why not RustRover?

In my case because of [1], which makes working with a particular library I need to use almost impossible. I went from exclusively using JetBrains tools to having VS Code installed for rust-analyzer, which is a slippery slope.

[1]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUST-13097

You might have better luck waiting out that bug than holding your breath for full support from MS (where they'll have an equally annoying bug).

The visual studio debugger is just leagues beyond the rest.

Why specifically Visual Studio for Rust?

The debugger.

Microsoft as a platinum member of the Rust Foundation is probably reason enough to not adopt the language.

Why? What negative impact will it have, by your prediction?

Why, funding needs to come from somewhere.

It's not like they took over the project or became it's main contributor or something.

Replace project with politicians election campaign.

If Microsoft does something you don't like with Rust you're free to Fork.

Microsoft has been pretty good to developers lately.

Other than all the game devs they just laid off.

Good news is they can’t lay off any members of the Rust Foundation.

Except Windows developers, since Windows 8 WinRT, Windows 10 UWP, Project Reunion, WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, killing .NET Native and C++/CX, while their business units put Web widgets everywhere, mess.

Electron is here.

For better or worse most developers aren't developing true native apps anymore.

That doesn't take away from what Microsoft has done for open source lately.

That is what Web apps are for, no need to ship Chrome alongside each application.

Everyone shipping Electron is helping Google to turn the Web into ChromeOS.

Not like they are being sued for stealing code at this very moment. They are just so good to developers/s.

But TypeScript and C# are both awesome.

I don’t know that I’d rush to call Typescript awesome. It’s only awesome sitting next to JavaScript. Compared to say another modern language (I.e Dart or Kotlin) which has proper typing, compilation and didn’t have to take on all the baggage of that level of JS interop it’s actually quite a shit language.

Just using the idea of mixins as a quick example.

Here is how they look in Dart: https://dart.dev/language/mixins

And here’s how they look in Typescript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/mixins.html

No, they are not. There was a time when Microsoft tried to sneak C# through Mono into the Gnome desktop under the "promise" that they would not enforce legal action. Fortunately, many smelled the BS from miles away, except for some misguided Gnome developers. Why should Rust not also be a vehicle for Microsoft's new incursion into, e.g., the Linux kernel, where some are already poking Rust?

I am not all that familiar with the Rust Foundation; but I do not trust corporate-owned languages in general, let alone ones where Microsoft seeks to have an influence.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/07/micro...

When .NET (that is, what became CoreCLR runtime flavour) was open-sourced, it was done in such a way as not to cause issues for existing Mono, Xamarin and Unity code, and allow cleanly merging the first two into overarching .NET ecosystem.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/LICENSE.TXT

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/PATENTS.TXT

Given that MSFT never sued anyone for .NET or .NET-related matters, so far their reputation is clean in that area, unlike certain Java-related company.

(after reading the thread, I'd like to suggest taking a seaside vacation)

This is not a refutation of my statement. The episode I mentioned came years before the opening of .NET core, and the threat of a lawsuit was very much real at the time. Their track record is generally still one that does not promote trust.

I guess you’ll also have to avoid adopting C++ and Javascript and Python and JSON…

Honestly, that sounds fantastic.

Indeed. C++ is garbage with "cout << this << is << how << they << expect << you << to << print << stuff". Javascipt is only used for privacy violations on the web. And Python has significant indentation and too many types.

Don’t worry friend, after 30 years C++* will have a smattering of support for a print function in the standard library

*some versions of some implementations

I think this is a really fun complaint because iostreams is terrible and has no reason to be terrible, but if you use C++ in the day to day it just does not matter. There are so many other problems. If your first complaint is about iostreams you probably did not get past hello world.

JavaScript one made me spit my drink. Thank you for making my day.

Funny but not untrue!

C++ is designed by a committee, for better and for worse, with TS contributions from people of a variety of industries and backgrounds.

Rust doesn't even have a formal spec, it's just whatever rustc admits. The potential for a single corporation to steer that for its own benefit seems greater to me. And we know how MS has attempted to destroy Linux before, in particular with its incursion with .NET in Gnome.

I get you feel the need to have MS and that's for good reason but not every single thing that they do is not and cannot be that bad.

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