Comment by Artemis2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artemis2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Both Google and Mozilla have teams dedicated to their languages, but they represent a very small portion of the total number of contributors to the language. I couldn't find exact lists of the team members inside both organizations.

In terms of volume of contributions, for Go, Google employees are by far the most active: https://github.com/golang/go/pulse. In this graph, the 7 top contributors to the project are Google employees. The Rust pulse graph shows the same trend (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulse), with the top 6 contributors being Mozillians (according to a few Google searches).

Something that noteworthy about Go is the "quality" of the team members: Google has Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Russ Cox working full time on the language. Mozilla may have a few great developers on Rust too, but Google is very serious about Go.

I don't have any information about how financial and human resources are used by Google and Mozilla for the development.

The reason why we recognize the names of the Google people is because of past achievements but when they were working on those we did not know their names either. I think it is a bit much to couple 'quality' to notoriety, for all the same money the Rust people are every bit as good as the Go people and Rust will be their claim to fame (if it already isn't doing that) a couple of years down the line.

In the linked Rust graph, eddyb (the third-highest committer) is a volunteer (an unimaginably prolific one), not a Mozilla employee. kmcallister (the fifth-highest committer) is a Mozilla employee, but not actually on the Rust team (they work primarily on Servo (though there is a fair bit of spillover between the two projects)). Rust has a few other full-time Mozilla employees that aren't represented on that chart for whatever reason (working on feature branches, perhaps?), such as nrc and pcwalton.

sfackler is a volunteer, too.

Just goes to show how blurry the line is that I've never actually noticed that he's not an employee. :P

pcwalton, at least, has mostly been focusing on making Servo completely amazing. Not a lot on the rustc front these days. Sucks for us, great for Servo. (because pcwalton is fantastic)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com