Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thagsimmons 1237 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
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)