When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
It's not about security or politics
This article is not a repetition of prior ones. Rather, it is a response to disturbing trends among both Rust critics and proponents/pushers. They choose to make about politics a discourse that needs to focus on questions like:
- How many "compilers" does Rust have?
- What is the licence of core code?
- How many years has Rust been around for?
- How stable are the interfaces and what has backward compatibility looked like in the first decade?
- How many "crates" get (or got) abandoned and why?
- What happens in terms of trademarks when one forks Rust?
- How many Rust forks are there?
- How are future interfaces decided on (within Rust or outside it)?
- What are the corporate affiliations (strings) of core developers?
- What is the performance of Rust like (compared to analogous implementations in other languages for some given program with identical functionality)?
- How many software and hardware architectures are supported?
- Who determines leadership and who is the steward?
- What is the total size of Rust (LOCs, MBytes etc.) at a bare minimum?
Rust introduces additional security risks while mitigating some others. It's not a magical solution or some long-sought panacea. So please forget about that weak talking point.
Regardless of the alleged politics of self-described "Rust People" (and censorship based around those politics), the more serious issue is their reliance on Microsoft and proprietary tools. We should focus on that latter issue. It's not a "partisan" question; it's not even remotely political. █
Image source: A bouquet of dried pale yellow roses on rust background.