[thagsimmons]

This sounds great, but I don't think Rust has the complement of highly skilled core developers needed to tackle something this ambitious. I'm a close observer of the Rust project, and my impression is that Rust's core development team has been hollowed out over the past few years - there's been a string of quiet departures, which sadly included some of the most powerful contributors. The Rust project is quite secretive and opaque about its internal politics, so I don't know if there's any unified reason for the attrition, and I don't think it's useful to try to read the tea leaves. At this point, I'm just keen to be reassured that Rust has the momentum to complete things like async and shore up holes in the type system on a reasonable timescale.

[pcwalton]

People come and go from every project. I haven't noticed any particular drop in momentum for the Rust compiler. (Also, the Rust compiler dev community is hardly "secretive and opaque"--just look at the amount of drama that regularly spills out into the open. I can't think of any compiler that's more openly developed than Rust, in fact.)

A brand-new Rust compiler may well never happen, but if it doesn't happen it's because the business value for a complete rewrite isn't there, not because of some mass departure of compiler developers.

[spoiler]

> I'm a close observer of the Rust project, and my impression is that Rust's core development team has been hollowed out over the past few years - there's been a string of quiet departures, which sadly included some of the most powerful contributors.

Can you give more specifics on this?

[thagsimmons]

I don't want to list specific contributors here. We often have no information on why people left the project - there might be all sorts of personal factors. I will say that my broader sentiment - that Rust's momentum has slowed, that it's not delivering on its commitments in a timely way, that there are concerns about it's ability to deliver in future - has been expressed publicly by high profile past core contributors:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/96709#issuecomment-11...

I don't think Rust should tackle any ambitious project to rewrite the compiler while these basic concerns remain.

[kibwen]

Most of the high-profile departures from the compiler happened in the wake of the 2018 edition (the first new edition since 1.0, and the edition that had to invent the very notion of "edition"), where a lot of people pushed themselves far too hard to deliver on what would be, in retrospect, far too aggressive of a release deadline. The edition just barely made it out in the 2018 calendar year, after getting delayed a handful of times, but it resulted in massive burnout among those contributing to its features, including the person who wrote the comment linked above. In practice Rust has actually been recovering quite nicely over the past few years after reaching a nadir of volunteer motivation in 2019; https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pulse/monthly tells me that 178 discrete authors have contributed to just the rust-lang/rust repo over the past month.

[spoiler]

Thanks for linking that thread, it's an interesting discussion. I didn't realis GATs were so polarising. I understand why, but it was my assumption that everyone was okay with the limitations, and that it would eventually be lifted (similar to how NLL and GAT lift limitations currently)

[HideousKojima]

The biggest name that left was Steve Klabnik. He made some statements that made it sound like he was upset with Amazon's involvement in the language, but as I recall it he didn't really go into any specifics so I don't really know.

[thagsimmons]

While there was some stink around his departure, he's not one of the contributors I'm concerned about here. I'm thinking more of people working on deep technical issues around the language and type system.