[mwcampbell]

> If we could go back in time and have the rust project decide to never implement async, I wonder what rust would look like today.

If withoutboats is right [1], then Rust would never have received the industry backing to be as successful as it is now.

[1]: https://without.boats/blog/why-async-rust/ especially the section "Organizational considerations"

[josephg]

"Pleasing to corporate sponsors" isn't what comes to mind when I think about great programming languages.

[mwcampbell]

But it probably is a prerequisite for any project achieving its mission on a large scale. I'd rather have a programming language that makes a big positive impact in the security, reliability, and efficiency of software that lots of people use, than one that's aesthetically pleasing but not widely used.

[simon_o]

It's not an either or.

We have hundreds of languages made to please the corporate overlords.

Can't we just have one language that's actually nice to use?

[josephg]

C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies, and they did just fine. Zig is the same, today. (It has some small sponsors, but nothing like the corporate support of rust.)

[jasode]

>C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies,

I don't know what you had in mind for "sponsored" but others would disagree and say both C and C++ were "sponsored by AT&T Bell Labs" because the people who created them (Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup) were employees of AT&T. Analogous to Rob Pike, et al. of Go Language being employed/sponsored at Google.