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> from my totally uninformed bystander perspective, there's been a sharp drop in people working on the language and compiler full-time since around Mozilla layoffs, and Rust still hasn't recovered from that
In terms of number of commits to the rust-lang/rust repo, activity peaked in late 2019/early 2020, whereas the Mozilla layoffs took place in late 2020. Activity since late 2020 has mostly stayed stable, and remains well above where it was at any point prior to 2018: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors
In addition, I know of several former Mozillians who remain employed to work on Rust, including one who heads the Rust team at Amazon.
As far as the number of contributors to each release, it's currently hovering around an all-time average high (although a handful of past releases have anomalously high peaks): https://thanks.rust-lang.org/
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I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2].
They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win 8. That means they are no longer going to guarantee that the project builds on those platforms and passes all tests via CI.
As long as it is feasible they will probably keep CI runs for those platforms and if interested parties step up and provide sufficient maintenance support, it will remain tier 2. i.e a guarantee that it builds on those platforms via CI but not necessarily that all features are supported and guaranteed via passing tests.
If interested parties can provide sufficient maintenance that all tests continue passing, it will be tier 1 in all but name. However the rest of the development community won't waste their time with issues like Win 7 and 8's partial support for UTF-8.
And once CI stops being feasible for the compiler team to host, it'll drop down to tier 3. If there's sufficient interest from the community towards maintaining these targets, in practice you should see comparable support to with tiers 1 or 2 however now any CI will be managed externally by the community and the compiler team will stop worrying about changes that could break compilation on those targets.
TLDR: They aren't saying "it'll no longer work" but rather "if you want it to stay maintained for these targets, you have to pitch in dev hours to maintain it and eventually support the infrastructure to do this because we don't see a reason to continue doing this". So if you care for these targets, you'll have to contribute to keep it maintained.
[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651
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