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A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!
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If that’s what happens, it’s not a great outcome. Foundation changes policy, restricting the use of a mark. The community responds by… ceasing to use the mark. That’s what they were asking for!
If a whole slew of things were only available in Crab, the Rust trade mark would be devalued. That would be the one coherent theory of why you would launch such a project and try to get others on board. And it is why Ashley G Williams was commenting in that Register piece on the lack of technical talent (“language designers”) that had jumped ship. Commitment of talent and effort and resources is by and large what makes the trade mark valuable. People who are important to the project leaving is the only useful measure of an effective protest.
Since the Crab project fails to mention any specific people who have signed on, or even who decided to create it, I don’t see it having any impact whatsoever. The Rust Foundation will not feel threatened by this. I suspect the maximum it can be is just another IceWeasel. That is certainly the vision laid out by this person on one of the issues, who despite posting as if they created it, is careful to disclaim any responsibility for the project or to call any of the decisions their own. (Come on!) https://github.com/crablang/crab/issues/14#issuecomment-1508...
It’s also the vision laid out on the website: “promoting the language without worrying about the litigation associated with trademark infringement.” Basically the project has outlined the least ambitious possible goals and apparently nobody is willing to sign their name on it. My advice is to write an open letter and open it for signatures instead.
This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise that all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main branch. Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a different name.
Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to simultaneously keep the current structure of bottom up development where each team (compiler, lang, crates.io, cargo) has the autonomy to make decisions for themselves, but the project as a whole can speak can come to a consensus and speak with a single voice. That's what this RFC tries to capture (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfc-leadership-council/blob/mai...). But the project isn't there yet, and is making these frustrating missteps in the interim. The lack of transparency into these missteps manifests as "bureaucracy" to outsiders like us.
If Crab lang actually attracted people doing the real work of development, they would have the exact same "bureaucracy" as teams tried to figure out how to build consensus and speak with one voice. The fact that they don't have bureaucracy is a direct consequence of them not doing any work right now. None of the people involved in regular Rust work, as far as I can tell, so they might not be aware of this.
Lastly, I want to note that the top comment in this thread is blaming the Foundation, which is simply bizarre. The Foundation very explicitly tries to stay hands off on technical decisions and does not interfere in how the teams organise themselves. You may disagree with that, but it's an inaccurate characterisation.
>> Rust is defined by the implementation.
Hopefully not for long:
https://github.com/ferrocene/specification
https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/the-ferrocene-language-spec...
Hopefully Ferrocene can lead to Rust itself being standardized.
To me, it seems inevitable that there will be multiple implementations of Rust, especially if Rust continues to be more widely adopted and used in new domains.
I would also not be surprised if Rust were to adopt optional language extensions for specialized use cases, similar to Ada's language annexes:
http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-1-1-2.html
Why? Because the Rust implementation you use for video game programming does not need all of the same features as the Rust implementation that you use for safety-critical embedded systems (for example: railroad control software).
Indeed, by criteria of community drama, .NET is also too immature for use. See [1], as the conclusion of that.
[1]: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/40
According to github rust has been forked 10,819 times...
I'm involved in the Ferrocene project (1), so I'd like to clarify some things about the Ferrocene Language Specification. It is deliberately called Ferrocene Language Specification and not Rust Language Specification. The specification serves first and foremost the needs of the Ferrocene project - we just need a spec to certify the compiler. It may be useful to others, that's why we open sourced it.
It is not a specification that standardizes rust or prescribes any behavior to the compiler. It's a specification that describes certain aspects of the behavior of the existing rust compiler. It's neither comprehensive nor is intended to be. It follows the changes in the compiler. If there's a mismatch between compiler behavior or the spec, the spec is considered faulty. It is also not sufficient to write a new compiler based on the spec.
As such, Ferrocene is not an effort to standardize rust. We consider the Ferrocene project a certified downstream of the rust project. Any push to standardize rust would need to come from the rust project itself. We have not intention to create any such standard.
That said, there is some interest in building a specification for the rust language in the project itself - here's the relevant RFC https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355
(1) I am one of the managing directors of Ferrous