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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.

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If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.

It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else. Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.

I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions then don't do radical things.

Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.

... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also mention GNOME.

I don't think they really did much for their parent project though? They're just forks that are more successful than the parent, but that's a different thing. My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.

I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly from code pushed to the forked versions.

> Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim

GCC had a standard to live up to (and it extended that standard in plenty of ways), the others aren't languages per se and do not and never did have the mission to appeal to the people that write non-sexy system software for a living. They value stability and a lack of drama in the suppliers of their tools above all else because any kind of fragmentation has the potential to cause them to have to (much) more work and they usually already have plenty of that.

And if the community was confident in Rust's leadership, this wouldn't be happening.

Which, to me, makes it seem that "hey, don't fork the community" is kinda brutally missing the point at hand, or at least feels aimed in the wrong direction.

It’s not the language that aims to be that, it’s people. And different people have different aims.

I've followed enough of the Rust debate that I'm suspicious of those people that have lost sight of that particular goal.

Doesn't look like the leadership is interested in stability so, maybe it's a good time to consider alternatives?

Why not?

Competition if anything breeds more innovation.

I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.

Because the working programmers are busy enough already. Have them part attention at Rust vs. Crab and a part of them will likely just leave.

All this drama and the fork likely seem extremely important to the parties involved but everyone else just wishes they would get along.

As a working dev I want one Rust.

If some drama is the reason why people may leave Rust, I guess engineering is not this person's or team's strength.

Agreed, it's just that I seriously don't want to pay attention whether I should keep using Rust or switch to Crab. I simply don't want to care, I got plenty of work on my plate already.

...You know?

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