Development quotes of the week

Ideally, the project goals of an open source project like Rust are simply the combination of personal goals of everyone working on it. And this is tricky. Because when a new person shows up, we don’t assign them a task that fits with our goals. Instead, this person comes with their own goals and ideas, adding to an already quite diverse set of potentially conflicting goals.

And this is why an open source project run by volunteers needs a management structure. You can’t just put together a hundred people with each their own goals, and hope it all works out.

So, weirdly, the first piece of software cannot be software. It’s going to be much more akin to hardware. Taken to the extreme, it could literally be made out of wires hooked together in the right way, or a string of core rope memory that twiddles the electrons just so. The idea is going to have to leap from our brain into the physical world, without going through a software intermediate stage.

This feels like a bit of a mystical experience that I think we’ve lost in modern computing. These days, if you have a new platform you want to bootstrap, you have an existing computer that you use to puppet the new hardware. You cross-compile software for the new target, flash its storage through a USB programmer, and you’re done. It’s way less tedious than bootstrapping from scratch, but it obscures that crucial transition from a purely hardware world into the universe of software. Every time that transition happens, it’s a kind of Big Bang for a new universe of runnable ideas. I think it’s a pity that we’ve optimized bringup to the point where few people get to experience that first leap between worlds.