Some Rust person posts to Twitter, another Rust person posts to a web log, there's stuff about "Leadership" and conferences. In response, we get numerous submissions to Hacker News which garner hundreds of comments each; one of them well on the way to a thousand.
A new version of the actual programming language comes out, with isatty(3) functionality that seems oddly late and debug options that aren't quite yet at where Microsoft is with stripped PDB files, and there are no comments at all.
This shows something about Hacker News and Rust, I think.
Well, yeah, it does say a lot about both Hacker News and "Rust the... community, or whatever".
But one of the cool (IMHO), but possibly unexciting, things about Rust the programming language, is that it comes out with a highly regular stream of small, predictable updates.
The last release, Rust 1.69 only got 3 comments[1] here. The release before that, 1 comment[2].
Yes, my point precisely. This is a long standing thing. With other programming languages, runtime library, compiler, and language changes actually are exciting. There's much discussion on Hacker News about GCC and Modula-2, or a distributed C++ compiler, for example. A language change that changes what happens when the allocator runs out of memory to allocate was a hugely interesting thing for C++. But in the very thing that you point to, no-one even remarks on it.
Maybe all Hacker News threads on Rust need a regular "Isn't there a programming language around here somewhere?" nudge. (-:
>This shows something about Hacker News and Rust, I think.
One would expect people to care more about how the project is governed, and wrongdoing, which has much wider implications that issaty(4) being "oddly late" or whether the debug options are "there yet".
Having met programmers, I have no such expectation. My long experience is that they care quite a lot about debug information changes; and barely know any of the people involved in language designs and compiler implementations.
Your expectations seem to be based upon the idea that when it comes to Rust the "Hackers" who read Hacker News aren't like programmers, and the "News" is tantamount to soap opera. That's a shame if true.
>My long experience is that they care quite a lot about debug information changes; and barely know any of the people involved in language designs and compiler implementations.
Not sure which "programmers" you met in your "long experience" that never cared about language designs and compiler implementations.
Corporate programming drones? People doing CRUD apps who don't care for the history, lore, and ongoing developments in language design? Yeah, most programmers are like that.
Not the kind of programmers that would frequent HN, Lambda the Ultimate, and such websites, though. So you probably never met HN crowd programmers then, who can do both program and debate language designs and compiler implementations, worship people from Chuck Moore and McCarthy to Rich Hickey, SPJ, Joe Armstrong, and Alan Kay, and can even walk and chew gum at the same time.
Probably also missed the fact that the first line of people involved in the case, and in publicizing and discussing the case are not just developers but core Rust contributors - hardly "tech bros" or managers types you can dismiss as "no programmers".
A new version of the actual programming language comes out, with isatty(3) functionality that seems oddly late and debug options that aren't quite yet at where Microsoft is with stripped PDB files, and there are no comments at all.
This shows something about Hacker News and Rust, I think.