We Turn Out to Have Been Right About Rust
OVER the past half a decade (more like 4 years or so) we've been sceptical if not critical of Rust. We also explained why. It's not about stewardship (Google funding, Mozilla leadership, Microsoft hosting) and speech control, albeit those were originally causes for concern. The main reasons were - and still are - technical, legal, and social. We got a lot of abuse for taking that stance, but seeing what has happened this past week (as mentioned yesterday, about 3 different things happened around the same time) the future of Rust seems uncertain, the future of Rust in Linux (not the same thing) isn't too clear, and what I said two years ago is echoed by more people.
Kernel people are getting fed up, Debian is becoming somewhat fed up, some people resign, and Linus Torvalds belatedly opens his mouth.
Curiously enough, some of the same people who pushed fake security (bricking Linux) are also the ones who attempted to vilify me for my scepticism of Rust (I've been a C developer since my teenage years, unlike them) and the methods were similar, e.g. trying to distract from objective, factual criticisms by painting the whole matter as an act of intolerance (the OSI resorted to the same tactics).
I'm quite frankly frustrated but not angry at these methods. In a sense, those methods have come to be expected. If you make a potent, solid argument against something - and assuming rebutting that argument is difficult - they'll typically try to talk about your character. Even left-leaning activists suddenly get maligned if not defamed as bigots. People who make rational arguments are sometimes being called "crazy".
Anyway, time will tell if we were right about Rust all along. So far it's looking this way. Rust won't vanish completely; the hype will, just like with Haskell. █