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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> Chris (also created swift) talked in the past the reason for not fully open-sourcing was more because he wanted to get all the core design decisions right. He said this was a big thing Swift got wrong as it scaled too quickly being fully open source at the beginning.

Then he has learned the completely wrong lesson. Swift spent its first years floundering from breaking change to breaking change (from Swift 1.0 in 2014 to approximately Swift 5.0 in 2019) precisely because it wasn't open-sourced from the outset, instead being developed in the traditional airtight Apple fashion. In contrast, Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years pushing embarrassing major releases to an allegedly-1.0 language to fix problems that any actual user could have identified.

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Well I think point was if they had gotten some fundamental things right from beginning they would not have to go through this 4.0 -> 5.0 breakage mess.

> Rust was open-sourced from the outset, years before even its 0.1 release in 2012, which then allowed it to explore its design space in the hands of real users improving their own language without having to spend five years

One can keep pounding on this but endless discussions about pros/cons Rust Async model, library, framework bifurcation and shortcuts to deal with it does not seem like given an open design win that many in Rust community assume.

Going by the way Rust always seems to get inserted in any language related discussion no matter what, IMO it could a meme "What would Rust people do?" when deciding what should not be done.

I think a bigger issue than open source timing is the community governance necessary to shape a tool that serves the needs of a lot of stakeholders. Swift has lived under the shadow of Apple's (often secret) product priorities. The extremely poor backwards compatibility is why I invested in Rust instead, and I think Chris has expressed some misgivings about how the function builder stuff got added unilaterally. It appears what they're trying to do with Mojo is build a more coherent starting design with a closed process but the experience of client work, and then open having skipped over some of the teething issues. We'll see if it works.

> IMO it could a meme "What would Rust people do?" when deciding what should not be done

You betray your own ignorance here. Rust became massively successful despite having no corporate mandate or Big Tech progenitor, precisely because it listened to its users and empowered them to participate in the language design and development process. Trying to feebly gesture in the direction of Rust's async support doubly betrays your ignorance, both because Rust's async support is extremely good for its given design goals (not that it couldn't still be better), but also because you don't appear to realize that being developed in the open was what revealed the disastrous interactions between Rust's goals and the original pre-1.0 green thread runtime which characterized the language for a large proportion of its nascent development. Please don't bother speaking on Rust's history or development process again, to spare us your tiresome and consistent ignorance.

> Please don't bother speaking on Rust's history or development process again, to spare us your tiresome and consistent ignorance.

Well, one can always head back to their echo chamber to avoid hurt feelings, instead of telling others to not speak their mind.

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" ~ Isaac Asimov, 1980

True. On positive side sometimes cult members do see wrong in their ways and apologize[1] . Sadly it is not always they will do that. Mostly they will spend time on attacking non-members.

1. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/05/29/RustConf/

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