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Comment by dataking | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that is necessarily true. Rust has only one compiler (and I think adding a second one would be a huge effort with no clear win) yet it is developed by a community that is very welcoming to newcomers. At least, that's been my experience.

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It is definitely true. There's virtually no room for improving the underlying compiler toolchain because there's no allowance or support for an alternate implementation (using GCC, for example).

Go at least has gcc-go, which is a compliant implementation that gets some benefits from being part of GCC (like not completely broken support for dynamic link libraries!).

Having a second compiler implementation forces the language grammar and behavior to be specified in a formal manner that allows anyone to understand how it works.

How is there no allowance? A lot of people in the community would love a rust compiler that can compile down to C for instance.

Maybe the tool chain is hardcoded to use the standard compiler? But that's more likely because of YAGNI, not because the rust community hates freedom.

The toolchain is built on top of rustup which very purpose is managing multiple compilers. If one were to build a different rustc it could be swapped in even in the world we have today.

That's cool. I haven't used Rust yet so I didn't know.

I haven't thought consciously about that, but it turns out that I've been doing that kind of validation unconsciously. I didn't get interested in actally using D, for example, until the GDC variant arrived (Dlang-support in the GCC collection).

Gcc compiles Rust fine. Its borrow checker won't bark at you, but that doesn't affect code generation.

OCaml and Haskell are one-horse towns, with substantial history, that are not going away.

But as Stroustrup says, there are languages people complain about, and languages no one uses. You generally end up better off investing your time in mastering a language people complain about. Bitterly. Once that meant FORTRAN.

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