Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 14:16 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: Rust backwards compatibility by atnot
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

> what happened instead is that he deliberately, secretly sabotaged the addition of reflection to the language out of an unknown mixture of racism and powertripping at the thought of his kingdom of macros becoming slightly less relevant

Sounds spicy. Can I read about this somewhere in more detail?

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 16:01 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

I think this is the best you may find. The question of who exactly did what and when to whom is still not answered (and I'm not sure it can be answered, at this point).

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 16:56 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (2 responses)

The RustConf 2023 keynote mess and "sabotaging the addition of reflection" is the same thing?

I must be missing additional context.

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 17:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

The keynote was about ongoing work on the way to add reflection to Rust. And that work was stopped after they keynote fiasco.

Whether that was deliberate sabotage or not, but the end result: no one works on reflection in Rust anymore.

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 17:18 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

With help of your and atnot's replies, I finally connected the dots now.

That's a damn shame.

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 20, 2024 16:58 UTC (Tue) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

Worth noting that this is before the revelation of the degree to which dtolnay was involved and his disastrous response. It also spends a lot of time disecting things that are not relevant to anyone affected, like the exact mechanisms of how it happened and who said what and when with what motives.

Here's my TL;DR of the timeline:
- thephd et.al. get strongly encouraged by a wide array of people to work on reflection
- They receive a sudden reversal of some decision out of the blue and nobody wants to be responsible for it or tell them what it's about. They smell a rat and demand a technical explanation of why the work was not considered up to scratch.
- Receiving no such explanation they nope out, correctly detecting the telltale signs of someone pulling strings against them behind the scenes (a thing any black person living in the US will be keenly attuned to)
- Big drama, everyone blames someone else, it was nobody's fault, it was actually legitimate concern, etc. (fasterthanlime post happens here)
- Lots of people step down from various roles as a result of letting this happen and/or protecting the person who did it, which nobody names.
- Much later, word gets out that dtolnay was in fact pulling strings behind the scenes and just let everyone take the fall for him. He responds to this with a bizarre github gist full of verifiable bs. And then reaches out to thephd asking for how to resolve this. They, once again, demand a technical critique of their work.
- Dtolnay can't offer it. thephd reaffirms that they will not return to Rust until such a technical critique is made. This has not happened even after david's name was known, evidencing thephd's hunch that such a critique never existed. (https://cohost.org/ThePhD/post/7169013-weird-question)

And that's where things remain today.

(But if you have way, way, too much time on your hands here's the most recent thing I know of that attempts to summarize what happened: https://dragon.style/@pyrex/111005018693053136)

Rust backwards compatibility

Posted Aug 25, 2024 23:09 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> (But if you have way, way, too much time on your hands here's the most recent thing I know of that attempts to summarize what happened: https://dragon.style/@pyrex/111005018693053136)

Summary of the summary:

1. People pull strings to win. Sad but business unfortunately as usual. Even the best language in the world is still affected by politics and non-technical issues.

2. The person who pulled the strings was racist because... the "victim"[*] is black and the evil guy is white. Wow. If you found anything tangible that I missed then please correct me. If not, that's sheer and obvious defamation.

Ironically, the racism accusation comes after a truckload of other, more substantiated accusations that are 10 times enough to explain what is supposed to have happened.

There is nothing tangible to prove that the guy is _not_ racist either. I naively assumed that in such a void, everyone had a right not to be called racist but maybe I don't spend enough time on this new social media thing.

[*] quotes because that term is normally used for bigger life problems than being rejected from Rust.