[thomastjeffery]

It's certainly true that corporations do put a lot of work into languages and runtimes. Apple created LLVM and clang, Microsoft created .NET and CLR with C#, F#, VB.NET, etc.

These projects were valuable to Apple and Microsoft for a variety of reasons:

* promoting their IDE: XCode builds faster, and has better error messages. You can use any .NET language with Visual Studio in the same project.

* promoting their platform: Objective-C and Cocoa let you create fast GUI apps in a standard way, and we don't need GCC anymore. .NET provides a useful feature-complete standard library over a variety of languages.

To contrast, Rust was made with the intention of simply making a better systems language. Rust doesn't have a standard library or environment tied to a specific OS or proprietary dependencies. Rust itself doesn't promote Windows, OS X, ASP.NET, Cocoa, IOS, Android, etc. That is what makes it seem much less likely that rust would be created by a corporation.

[AceJohnny2]

> Apple created LLVM and clang

To be specific, LLVM started as an academic project by Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner in 2000. Apple hired Chris Lattner in 2005 to work on LLVM for Apple. Clang, though, does appear to have been an Apple project, being introduced by Steve Naroff of Apple in 2007 as an open-source project.

[thomastjeffery]

Thanks for pointing that out.

LLVM is one of the main things Apple gets to claim credit for, yet they aren't the only ones who deserve it.

LLVM is one of the reasons rust is so great, and the world is better because of it.

[bluejekyll]

You can still give Apple credit for having sponsored a significant investment into LLVM. Without them, it might not have taken off the way it has.

[distances]

Indeed. Apple often also gets flak for taking KHTML and running with it, but footing the bill for WebKit development was a good thing for the Internet in general.

[sjwright]

Not giving Apple credit for LLVM or Webkit is akin to not giving Google credit for Android or Chrome.