Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

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That proc macros have significant drawbacks, and you personally weigh those drawbacks as having a lot of significance, doesn’t change that for many people, the juice is worth the squeeze. 375M downloads don’t lie.

I agree with you that there are significant drawbacks, which is why I’d love to see reflection happen in Rust.

> being at the root of the keynote incident

I don’t believe this to be true, based on what I know from both public and private information. I think a lot of people don’t like dtolnay due to the Palantir thing, and decided to try and inflate his involvement.

But even from just public information: blame lies with the decision makers. By his own account, Josh Triplett suggested a demotion, and Sage Griffin set that into motion. They’ve both since apologized. I do not believe they are solely to blame, but if you want to point fingers at individuals, they’re who I would describe as “in the center.”

Overall the blame relies on Rust’s continual failure to do governance in a way that’s responsive and legible to its users, and continually ignores the written rules to just do whatever whoever has the soft power wants. This isn’t a unique story in open source, of course.

> someone who doesn't aparently have any official position in the rust foundation

The Rust Foundation does not govern most of the things you’re upset with. He is a member of the libs-api team in the Project, though.

> being ex-palantir

I’ll be the first to say “Fuck Palantir” but being upset at people for where they worked a long time ago just doesn’t sit right with me. Do you think that anyone who’s ever worked anywhere objectionable should be branded with that decision for life? Many people don’t like me for working at Cloudflare. Is there no possibility for change in your mind?

If we truly want to play that game, you’re gonna have to exclude like half of the industry.

> 375M downloads don’t lie.

That de-facto standartisation (and resulting monopoly due to the network effect) is exactly why serde should either be part of std or be replaced with a more heterogeneous ecosystem.

You conveniently ignore the other incidents. Had it only been the keynote incident (including the non-apology 3 months later after he was ousted by someone else, and the therein included misrepresentation of thephds' opinion regarding his own talk) I would have brushed it off, but there is a pattern to it. The palantir thing is just the cherry on top because it is indicative of questionable moral compass to me.

A compass which can of course change, but if I had such a controversial former employer I'd distance myself from them after having such a change of heart (which to my knowledge hasn't happened).

Too long of a "Series of Unfortunate Events" to have this much power consolidated with a single BDFL for rusts serialization and metaprogramming story.

> If we truly want to play that game, you’re gonna have to exclude like half of the industry.

Completely unrelated, but maybe that's what it takes to grow as a field. As a german I have a lot less bussiness with palantir, but I'm reminded of the situation after WW2 where we had to essentially fill major political and bueraucratic roles with literal Nazis because we didn't have anyone else. The german internal intelligence service has been involved in a lot of crazy neonazi terrorist attacks to this day. Go figure.

> That de-facto standartisation

Sure, that's a fine opinion to have, but you were challenging my "people use serde" assertion. All I'm saying is that people do in fact use it.

> You conveniently ignore the other incidents.

Yeah, I submitted this post two days ago, but it hit the front page now. I was not exactly prepared to see comments here, I was on my morning walk, and typed that out on my phone. It was already getting too long.

> including the non-apology 3 months later after he was ousted by someone else

A "non-apology" because he wasn't the one at fault! And he was "ousted" because people were crying for his head, specifically, because of the Palantir thing. Not because he had any real thing to do with it. Yet people seem to want to blame him regardless of the actual facts.

But sure if you want to get into the other things, now that I'm at a computer:

> shipping binary blobs in serde to make a point and push an RFC

It is incredibly normal to ship binary blobs in other ecosystems. pjmlp will post on basically every Rust thread that Rust isn't a serious language until it can ship binary libraries. People care about compile times, and a binary serde would help with that.

With ineffectual Rust leadership, sometimes just doing the thing is the only way to actually get things done. I don't see responding to the needs of your users in spite of other people dragging their heels as "abuse of power."

> being the final descision maker of the latest core::time breakage

Do you have a citation on this one? I agree that this probably shouldn't have happened, but given that it took five minutes to recognize that it happend, type "cargo update -p time", and then move on with my life, it's not a huge deal to me. But Rust decisions aren't usually made by a single person, so that he personally somehow made the call would surprise me.

> (which to my knowledge hasn't happened).

As someone who is reasonably well known on the internet, it's still wild to me how much people expect others to put out in public about their personal lives. Asking for someone to publicly denounce an employer from years ago is just weird. People are free to keep their private life private.

Furthermore, even if he did do that, it's pretty clear that the folks who talk like this:

> Too long of a "Series of Unfortunate Events" to have this much power consolidated with a single BDFL for rusts serialization and metaprogramming story.

wouldn't even accept the apology. It's been years of casting every single thing into the worst light, in bad faith. I am glad that he is seemingly unphased by what I would describe as a borderline harassment campaign.

> Sure, that's a fine opinion to have, but you were challenging my "people use serde" assertion.

That wasn't my intention at all. I was challenging the narrative that serde has been one of the best things that happen to rust since sliced bread/borrow checking.

I'm gonna reuse a reply to a different comment because I feel it captures the gist of my opinion, and because the dtolnay drama was one point among many, and is again generating more emotional effort than it's worth:

But my point, is that his crates (and thus he) hold too much power, even if there had been 0 incidents. That's not his failure per-se, but it's rusts failure if a single person can hold this much power, and be involved with this many shit-storms, without someone stepping up and being like "maybe we should put the decisions for this essential infrasructure on more shoulders". Even if he was the rust messiah himself, I wouldn't be comfortable with a Bus factor of one, for something that "is often credited as a reason people reach for Rust."

We should stop putting serde on a pedestal and call it what it is, an ok serialization library, that falls short of the potential that rust has in that space.

We should also call syn by it's name. A lisp-style macro system to polyfill the shortcommings of rusts macros, that has become rusts de-facto macro system for anything that goes beyond the simplest declarative macros at 600.000.000 downloads.

No matter how you and I feel about the guy behind those things, it seems obvious to me that we should strive to replace serde with something better, and either replace the need for syn with a system for compile time introspection (I don't have high hopes for this anymore), or pave the cow paths and integrate the existing API into core (as a side effect also cutting down on compile times).

Feel free to step up and support your own serialization library. You too can have this "power"

Note: Your budget will be $0, your reward will be people hurling insults at you.

That's not how network effects work.

> That wasn't my intention at all.

I see, I misunderstood you, my apologies.

> That's not his failure per-se, but it's rusts failure if a single person can hold this much power

I do agree that bus factor is important. Unfortunately, this seems to happen in a lot of ecosystems: https://xkcd.com/2347/

> But my point, is that his crates (and thus he) hold too much power, even if there had been 0 incidents. That's not his failure per-se, but it's rusts failure if a single person can hold this much power, and be involved with this many shit-storms, without someone stepping up and being like "maybe we should put the decisions for this essential infrasructure on more shoulders". Even if he was the rust messiah himself, I wouldn't be comfortable with a Bus factor of one, for something that "is often credited as a reason people reach for Rust."

Man supports thanklessly a set of libraries that evolve on basically every minor rust version (syn/quote) for 6 years with minor hickups, and you want to Bus him? Over holding a seat at libs table? That's not a BDFL, that's seat at the round table.

Hic Rhodus, hic salta! You try doing the same.

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