Returning to Zig after losing trust in Rust's governance | Hacker News Reader

Returning to Zig after losing trust in Rust's governance

gracefulliberty.com

501(c)(3) organizations are non-profits that include charities, whereas 501(c)(6) organizations are non-profits with less strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c)(3) organizations have higher financial transparency requirements and higher restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).

The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. The Rust Foundation should change their governance structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).

The money contributed to the Rust Foundation by large corporate members supports initiatives[0] that benefit all users of Rust, and I am happy for it. The slow and deliberative approach the Foundation took to crafting the AI policy, and even the hedging language in the policy itself, are indicators of a healthy open organization. The author's scorn shows immaturity.

  [0]: https://rustfoundation.org/#initiatives

An "open" healthy organisation does not stack the cards during major policy discussions by forbidding major arguments against the adoption of a position its backers clearly want. The author is right to call that out. It was an extremely disappointing move for Rust to make.

It's also Ok to ban discussions that will lead nowhere or cause flame wars.

Yes the author is a kid - strictly codes as hobby (https://gracefulliberty.com/llms/). So would take the post as opinions, but no one shoudl read more than that into it.

> Meanwhile, Rust took its time.

Yes, this is the difference between a BDFL. A single person can make a decision faster, than a group of people. And consensus often leaves most people a bit miffed.

Again, the issue starts when the dictator grows mad and starts making decisions that make every contributor uncomfortable.

> To my horror, many software projects were accepting LLM-generated code. I had thought LLMs were unpopular among developers.

Why would a really stochastic auto-complete and analyzer be disliked by developers? LLMs are a useful tool, sometimes, but they aren't the <WE WILL REPLACE ALL WORKFORCE BY 2028> levels of hype that current frontier labs need to justify their costs.

> But Memory Safety!

I'd be genuinely flabbergasted if Zig ends up as safe as Rust without any overhead. So, no, adding Fil-C doesn't count. We have memory safety with overhead. We call it Java/C#/JavaScript/Go/<INSERT VM LANG HERE>.

The author has a point. You STILL need a github account to publish to crates.io.

TL;DR; the author feels betrayed because the Rust leadership didn't take a strong stance against LLMs like the Zig team did.

IMHO LLMs are causing lots of issues in the software world, especially in the open source communities but I don't think Zig's blanket rejection of everything AI-related is a good thing.

Not at all the take I got, it was a specific, very corporate, section about ”say nothing bad about LLMs” that was later removed due to backlash that caused the author to lose trust. They even go into specifics regarding the LLM policy and that it’s in many parts sound.

When I read the mentioned section I was very baffled, it’s like if Jensen of NVIDIA had made an appearance and wanted to sell GPUs.

> Not at all the take I got, it was a specific, very corporate, section about ”say nothing bad about LLMs”

It was merely a “can we please not start a flame war on LLMs and focus on what is relevant to the Rust project itself”.

Did it come out a Rust fork with no AI contributions, like in the same fashion it came up a Zig fork that accepted AI contributions (the one Bun was using before rusting)?

> When the biggest companies in the world are each giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, you probably don't want to upset them.

Don’t forget that those money ultimately go to individuals, that often willingly sacrifice their opinions and positions for the fat paycheque.

That's so true and although I agree with you, I can't judge them by doing this, You end up bowing down to those who pay you, just to survive.

Nah. Those people are skilled enough to go work somewhere else and make a very good living. They willingly chose the fatter paycheque.

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