[steveklabnik]

We’ve actually worked a lot to ensure that Mozilla can’t dictate what happens with Rust; we run a consensus based process, and while Mozilla has the largest single group of people involved in leadership, it’s still a very stark minority.

As a huge production user, Mozilla’s needs are still important to us, but we think of Rust as an open source project Mozilla contributes to, not a Mozilla project per se.

[tedunangst]

I wonder if this is good or bad. Sometimes it helps to have that singular vision. I think here of all the systems C coders I know, who have never used complex numbers, yet that finds its way into the standard.

[kibwen]

As a Rust user outside of Mozilla, it's very good. Rust would have had a hacked-on OO system solely in order to implement the DOM in Servo if browser engine hackers were the only ones with a voice. :P

It's fair to be concerned at the potential evolution of a language that doesn't have a BDFL (I myself came to Rust from Python, after all), but in practice I've come to trust the Rust devs as having very good taste (objective, I know!) and a strong resistance to maximalism (regardless of what some may claim... the list of features removed from the language is longer than the list of features that it has!).

[steveklabnik]

I think in general, the teams, and especially the core team, have a "singular vision" in the big-picture case; this helps. It really can go any way though, I've also seen BDFL projects where the D doesn't care about what the community wants, which ends up with that complex number problem too.