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David Tolnay on the "RustConf Keynote Fiasco" (gist.github.com)
45 points by henrikhorluck on Sept 4, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 97 comments



It'd be useful to know what the end goal is for ThePhd, like what would be a satisfactory outcome for them?

What happened to them was hurtful, I understand and sympathise with that. However when one steps back and reads their responses, coupled to an extent with their writing (of course someone else would reach a diff conclusion), they appear to be an aggressive and maybe even vindictive character.

You can't really quit the way you did, and then still dangle things like [0]. People who utter such things out can portray an "I'll get you" attitude.

Then when someone responds and you're unhappy with their response, you agress and call them a mtherfcker [1].

Some might consider it to be too late, however some form of mediation might still be necessary.

[0] https://cohost.org/ThePhD/post/2720152-mn#comment-fdd4ee8d-9...

[1] https://pony.social/@thephd/111005208985561162


You're saying he's not allowed to give Rust another shot and then leave Rust again once yet more bullshit is thrown his way from prominent members of the Rust community? Why not?

Is your problem with it that he decided to use Rust for that project or that he decided to move away from Rust for that project?


There's things a reasonable and mature person doesn't dangle knowing that it's unfruitful.

I'll give you an example of my impression of their comment. You ask your child to clean their room when you leave for work. When you come back, you find them having not cleaned it.

In retaliation, you say "I had spoken to the baker to make you your favourite cake for this weekend, now I'm going to call them and ask them to no longer make it".

The cake is "part of the public domain" of whatever thing they were working on, because if they were working on a private codebase nobody would care if they wrote it in D or E or G.

Read what you may of it. To deal with emotionally manipulative people in our lives, we've learnt to identify cues like this one. There's a reason why when angry the best advice is to bite one's tongue.


Okay. Say you're in a situation where you have publicly talked about doing a soon-to-be-public project in Rust. Then, something happens and you no longer want to use Rust. What do you do? Keep it secret that you have reconsidered your choice of language? Why?

Honestly, the only emotionally manipulative thing I see here is you. You're trying to make something huge out of the simple statement of "this is making me not want to use Rust for the project I was gonna use Rust for". Someone choosing a different programming language is not a Big Deal.


Yes, it is definitely best to throw your tantrum internally.


The change of language is going to be revealed once the project goes public though. What then? What are you supposed to answer when people start asking why you didn't use the language you said you'd use?

This is so incredibly psychotic, you'd have to walk on eggshells and make sure to never publicly talk about your choice of technology stack to not upset you people. No, people are allowed to talk publicly about what language they pick for their projects, and they're allowed to publicly disclose when they reconsider. Anything else is literally insane.


He (Jean Heyd) doesn't intend to give Rust another shot. He's done with Rust. Apparently.


My parent comment seems to be complaining that ThePHD did give Rust another shot (by picking it as the language for his next project) but then reconsidered in light of this.

I'm wondering what my parent comment thinks is so wrong about that (the "you can't really quit the way you did, and then dangle things like [0]" comment).


His comments so far have been never touching Rust. So, that's strange.

Anyway, he should pick language on technical qualities. That way he can avoid drama.


What do you mean? nevi-me's comment linked to this: https://cohost.org/ThePhD/post/2720152-mn#comment-fdd4ee8d-9.... That's, like, the core thing in my disagreement with nevi-me. It would've helped if you read nevi-me's comment before you decided to join the discussion.

I don't understand why you believe you're in a position to say what anyone "should" use as criteria for picking a language. If a language's leadership and most prominent community members were mistreating me and lying about me for half a year I might want to avoid that language too.


I don't have time to read everything everyone wrote everywhere. And I think it's probably bad for me anyway - becoming terminally online is not a goal to aspire to.

I missed it was pointing to specific comment and not the link to article. And his previous statements on Rust gave me impression he's forever done with it. Mea culpa.


Oh please fuck right off. How is saying "I had a bad experience with this community so I'm going to use a different programming language now" dangling anything?


"I had been making this thing that I was going to share with the world in X, now I'll have to choose Y or Z".

The dangle is this sharing of X with the world. If whatever they were writing was private, nobody would have cared, and they'd have known that enough not to bother dangling it.


First, there's absolutely nothing wrong with publicly discussing the Rust project/community's impacts on your choice of language.

Second, he had already publicly talked about doing a project in Rust. Should he have ... somehow avoided making it public that he was changing what language that soon-to-be-public project uses? How would that work?


One thing I don’t really understand: if conference organizers accept (or invite or whatever) a keynote speaker, and the acceptance/invitation doesn’t reference any particular topic, then presumably they are actually saying they will give a keynote slot to the speaker to speak about whatever they like. And if the speaker gives a talk about something they’ve worked on but that doesn’t have any sort of consensus to become part of Rust, so what? It’s a keynote talk, not a merge request.

If the organizers wanted a talk about an actual accepted feature, surely the invitation should have said so.


I'm the organizer who gave the invite. It was indeed explicitly framed as "you can talk about whatever you want". In my opinion it was pretty obvious this is what JeanHeyd would talk about before the invite went out. He told us about the topic in that same call. There was a member of project leadership in the call as well, no concerns were raised about the topic. The first time JeanHeyd learned of any concerns with it was when project leadership asked me to downgrade the talk


If I understand correctly, the problem hasn't been the organisational team, but David Tolnay himself. Who intervened with the help of Josh(?). In his own words:

    Josh was aware of this from his role as not only language co-lead, but also member of the RustConf program committee1.

    I expressed forceful skepticism that the compile-time introspection work, which I had been passively following with great interest, would achieve a state that would be suitable for a RustConf keynote in time for 2023 RustConf, for lack of adequate lang team iteration (neither for the Rust Foundation grant selection, nor conference presentation) to land well with the RustConf audience.
From https://gist.github.com/dtolnay/7f5da4bf057b7c6d0d00c6bed306...


I was once invited to give a talk (which was more or less a keynote, although I don’t think the word “keynote” was used) at a major conference. I was specifically invited to talk about my work on X. IMO it would have been really odd for anyone on the program committee to subsequently say “well, I’m skeptical that project X will pan out — maybe the talk should just be a regular track talk about X or a plenary talk about Y instead” after the invitation was given.

It’s not as though giving a talk implies any particularly strong endorsement by the community at large that the subject is going to pan out. And if the talk is just about “whatever the speaker is working on”, then there is absolutely no implied endorsement of what they end up talking about.


It's not merely odd, it's a crass (if low stakes) power play by someone obviously intent on sabotage (might be personal, might be related to a perceived fiefdom etc.).


That part is not obvious to me as an outsider. And framing something that shouldn’t have been done as a power play, when it could as easily have been simple ineptitude or some other issue, seems like it weakens the argument and escalates the situation.

Plenty of people who haven’t really thought about how conferences should work end up on committees running conferences, kind of like how plenty of developers end up as high level reviewers or managers regardless of their qualifications.


It's theoretically possibile that it's ineptitude, but only barely; if "I don't think that this feature is ready yet, so I will anonimously lobby behind the scenes to avoid it being talked about in public" is the strongest exculpatory explanation that someone can find for their actions...

Also, being inept and clinging to one's position isn't a good look either.


The response of JeanHeyd Meneide: https://pony.social/@thephd/111005164984251004


This is really hard to follow. Especially because of all those "some individuals", "someone", "two people". Why won't people put names on other people? Accusations are easy when done anonymously. Own your words!


Apparently a big part of the brouhaha is the Rust projet leaders closing ranks to not disclose the identity of the person who made the call to demote JeanHeyd's no-longer-a-keynote, widely assumed to be David Tolnay (because the comptime proposal in the keynote would be a threat to Tolnay's little software empire, most prominently the serde crate).

https://dragon.style/@pyrex/111005018693053136

I have no way to know if @pyrex' account is accurate, but Omerta and lack of transparency is not a good look in any organization.

Here is the dropped keynote, which does go in depth on the impact on serde (mostly simplifications):

https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generi...


> widely assumed to be David Tolnay

I would say that David Tolnay himself confirmes that in the linked Gist:

    I expressed forceful skepticism that the compile-time introspection work, which I had been passively following with great interest, would achieve a state that would be suitable for a RustConf keynote in time for 2023 RustConf, for lack of adequate lang team iteration (neither for the Rust Foundation grant selection, nor conference presentation) to land well with the RustConf audience.


Rust community is always in drama and it’s just silly and unprofessional


I have a vague memory of the Ruby community from around 2008-2010 going through dramas as well, but at least it wasn't in the core-lang layer.

It left a very similar impression: silly and unprofessional.


You can’t make an accusation like that based on “vague memory”. At least try to substantiate your claim.


Not the OP, but there even used to be a rubydramas.com site. Not longer available and archive.org doesn't work for me there, but there have been a few HN submissions about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rubydramas.com


It's been 13-15 years, Ruby-world was full of drama between DHH-fanatics, and their opposition. I won't be scavenging through Google's enshittified search to substantiate anything just to please the desire of random HN users.

And just to be very clear: I can do whatever I want (under what I believe is a good internal moral guidance); I wanted to comment on a vague recollection I had of the state of the world at the time and I did.


Given you explicitly marked it as 'vague memory' so people could choose to weight (or if they so wish discount entirely) your comment based on that, I don't really understand the complaint.


DDD - Drama Driven Development


Adding : to the front would make this pretty funny actually


I once worked at a university where the Physics department was in such disarray that they installed an english professor as chair of the physics department for a few years. Maybe some other language that's grown past its teen drama years could lend a hand with Rust? I don't think the current leadership are up to the task, frankly.


TLDR for those not aware of the drama: ThePHD was invited to give the keynote talk at Rustconf 2023 on reflection in rust. Someone emitted doubt it was a good idea and it was pulled in an insulting manner from him. Fast forward to now where it was speculated that dtolnay (an influencal person for rust) was the one expressing doubts.

IMO there is likely a lot of miscommunication and some power trip/ego that resulted in this particular event. Yes people should apologize and improve transparency but ThePHD is really not acting well either and has a big ego of his own it seems to me.


Ego, or not, this a by the book example of how not to deal with guests, or people in general for that matter.

Additionally, as side effect from this drama, ThePHD is now back working on WG14 and WG21, and his employer dropped all Rust related efforts.


Agreed. Very much ego issues on both sides indeed.

Next to that I feel some people love any negativity about Rust to make them feel better. Just like there are fans on the other end of the spectrum. Yet to me this just seems to be a typical human issue and that you see play out in pretty much any org and country… not sure why rust as a group of communities would be different then that. If you solve this you’re well on your way to have hope on world peace, no?

Most of us are pragmatic I would hope and realise that Rust has grown into an alternative for some projects where it suits for. Is it for everything? Is it perfect? Is it the best?

No, no, and shrug. But still, glad it exists :) let’s enjoy it. Continue to improve tech and ourselves and enjoy life a bit?

If he really wants to give the talk/keynote just put it on YouTube already… the world is bigger then a conference. Sure what happened was wrong, but seriously this blew out sooo out of proportion…


Why don't they just let old dramas just die rather than reviving the whole thing and continuing it?

The problem with the Rust community is that they continue old fires and just throw gasoline to attempt to put it out causing it to never end.

This is why almost no-one takes them seriously.


If David had come forward when everyone else did about how this situation played out, and actually spoken to JeanHeyd or apologized ever, that's exactly what would have happened.


Indeed. Any apology at all would be better than this non-apology


What is "big macro"?


To summarize the post, people quickly latched onto the idea that David was trying to sabbotage introspection to protect his empire of Rust packages which are critical to the use of macros (syn, proc-macro2) and heavy users (serde).


Geez

Reason 214 for not having macros in your language: reduce drama


To be fair, this is one part where I don't think macros caused the drama.

Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor.


> Not sure why, but broader Rust community really loves participating in drama, and seems incapable of applying the modicum of Hanlon's Razor.

This has been my frustration with it all. I quickly saw how this whole thing could have happened in a purely innocent way, not to dismiss other explanations but to see that multiple narratives could exist beside the one the mob was currently latched on to.


Theory that David Tolnay added precompiled serde macros to start a RFC process to add precompiled macros to cargo. Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck.

Part of this theory was that he sabotaged thePHD dev's talk in order to force community to rely on his crates `syn`, `quote`, etc. Rather than using Rust to maintain guarantees.

I mean who doesn't like working (mostly) unpaid for open source community in order to maintain Clout™?


I don’t think it’s a theory. He certainly tried to use the precompiled macros in service of this pre-RFC: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-sandboxed-determin...

Relevant section:

"Someone else is always auditing the code and will save me from anything bad in a macro before it would ever run on my machines." (At one point serde_derive ran an untrusted binary for over 4 weeks across 12 releases before almost anyone became aware. This was plain-as-day code in the crate root; I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years.)


> I am confident that professionally obfuscated malicious code would be undetected for years

There was even a contest for underhanded code (malicious code that, if found, someone could plausibly claim that it was just a honest programmer mistake rather than intentional malware), it was pretty cool

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/72v194/the_2016_under...

And there were talks to revive it

https://github.com/rust-community/team/issues/256


> Originally the conspiracy was to move Rust towards Bazel/Buck.

Never saw this part of the conversation and hope no one took my words to mean I felt that. I only expressed regret that he (a Project member and maintainer of one of the more critical packages) gave up on cargo wich I surmised by him saying that he did work for buck/bazel but didn't do anything for cargo but dumped the binary on us.


You might not have meant it, but people on Reddit/Discord, in a dysmal show of game of telephones thought it was a credible theory.


Huh, somehow I missed that bit on reddit. As for Discord, I tend to keep my interactions there to a minimum, so not suprised that I missed that.


Big Pharma but about macros in Rust.

This post is a response to the third link


"Tier 2" conferences would do well to blacklist this individual. While this is rather low-stakes as far as governance issues can go, the inadequacy is obvious.


I'm not sure if by Big Macro we're talking about dtolnay themselves?


It's a joke


[flagged]


That does not line up with the known facts at all. It sounds like people were excited by the idea of the speaker themself and different people had different thoughts on the topic and there were communication break downs around that.


You're suggesting that it was just a complete coincidence that the antagonist was invited to give the talk. If you're going to line up facts, don't omit the most relevant one.


IDK, seemed like it was based on merit to me https://dragon.style/@pyrex/111003848107863932


I wonder if this comment is Elon Musk's first output from his TruthGPT platform.


[flagged]


Please don't do personal attacks or flamewars on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Both the C community and the C++ community is strong enough to survive someone occasionally posting about how the committee is sometimes annoying to work with. In return, we get some pretty awesome new features and important fixes to the languages and their standard libraries. Seems like a win to me.


[flagged]


In this thread, I am "running defence" for his right to choose a programming language that's not Rust. I don't think that's going too far.

I don't understand why someone would be careful giving him grants just because the Rust leadership is utterly incompetent and creates drama.


[flagged]


I don't know the details of the agreement (if any) between the Rust Foundation and Meneide, but if the Rust Foundation thinks that Meneide broke an agreement then I'll let them allege that. I don't know how much use there is to speculating about it.

In any case, the Rust Project has made it clear that they're not interested in the compile time reflection the way Shepherd's Oasis was doing it, so I'm not sure what use there would be in completing that work.

You seem to be jumping around in this conversation, unwilling to stick to one point. Earlier, it seemed like your main complaint was his conduct. When I challenged you on that, you didn't back that up, you jumped over to this grant money speculation. If your issue with him is that you suspect foul play regarding grant money, why didn't you lead with that? If your issue with him is his conduct, why didn't you attempt to make any arguments for why his conduct is problematic when challenged on it?


[flagged]


Disagreeing with something isn't the same as glossing over it. You didn't say anything of substance, just an empty accusation of "fits of anger, uncharitable accusations to others, vindictiveness"; so there was nothing to address.

> JeanHeyd has a tendency to take any criticism to his work, and his technical opinions has meritless. He has a history of implying that there's bigotry, and that objection is the same as obstruction.

The very source of this issue is that there were apparently people in the leadership who took serious issues with the direction of the compile time proposal, but were seemingly unwilling to have the discussion about technical merits.

If he has a history of creating drama from technical criticism of his work, this RustConf fiasco is certainly not an instance of that.

You, however, have a history (in this discussion at least) of claiming something without backing it up. It would be very helpful if you actually linked to examples of him doing the things you're criticising him for, both on this point and the others.


[flagged]


Listen, I'm getting tired of this discussion. If you link to anything at all which confirms your claim that his problem in the RustConf/compile-time computation debacle is that someone criticized his work on a technical level, I'll just accept that you're correct and move on. If not... well. I'm done.


I have through this discussion asserted that JeanHeid started this drama over a perceived slight for having his talk downgraded. I have separately mentioned that JeanHeyd is a person who has issue taking criticism, but I have not claimed in this thread that this rust debacle was precipitated by this trait of his.

I did provide enough reasoning above for all this, but you again ignored, and didn't address any of it.

You have claimed that people were sabotaging his work. The onus of the evidence is on you. All public statements we've seen are that there might have been concerns, but before these concerns were discussed, JeanHeyd went full nuclear mode over his talk getting downgraded.


>> This RustConf fiasco is certainly not an instance of [his tendency to take any criticism to his work, and his technical opinions [as] meritless and [his] history of implying that there's bigotry, and that objection is the same as obstruction]

> It absolutely is

This is you claiming that "this rust debacle was precipitated by this trait of his."

Even if you're walking that back, you could've linked to anything which shows that "this trait of his" is anything more than your assertions. You haven't.

Also, I haven't claimed that anyone has been sabotaging his work.

Goodbye.


I'm not walking back. Let's go back to what I said:

------------------

> The very source of this issue is that there were apparently people in the leadership who took serious issues with the direction of the compile time proposal, but were seemingly unwilling to have the discussion about technical merits.

You actually don't know that. JeanHeyd said so, and you accepted. But this only confirms to my point. JeanHeid was given a grant to work on a language feature. Then he was also offered a keynote, which later got downgraded to a normal talk. It wasn't even pulled out. Following that JeanHeid threw a public hissy fit, and accused several people of acting in way that was hurtful, which was followed by a public online mob.

They hired him to be a consultant. They might not be very happy with the direction his work was taking, but even that would be his job to reach out and persuade others as a hired consultant, rather than assume bad faith.

You have just parroted JeinHeyd here, and turned that into some grand conspiracy by some illuminati inner circle to reject his work without merit. Never you question how well JeanHeyd worked, how well he communicated in delivering something he was paid to do. Because that's all JeanHeid knows how to do: to claim his work has been rejected without merit, rather than working with others and acquiescing to disagreement. They still offered him a slot for talk line up. They never told him to stop his work. Those are the facts so far.

> this RustConf fiasco is certainly not an instance of that.

It absolutely is, and as time goes by, more and more people are gonna realise that's the case. There is already in fact a growing number of voices in social media that are seeing through this charade.

------------

Now, if you will engage with what I'm saying above.

What precipitated this debacle? A perceived slight once JeanHeyd had a talk downgraded.

In which way JeanHeyd's sensitivity to criticism had a role on this whole debacle? Once he started an online mob over this, he went to assume that there were meritless objections to his work. He claims that nobody ever reached out to him about those objections. Did they fire him? No. Was he told to stop his work? No. It is more on him to deliver the work he was hired to, and find out what objections there might be, but it isn't even clear there any objections to work.

The fact is that JeanHeyd quit without properly ascertaining what technical objections people might have over his work, only because his talk got downgraded, and then went on to claim that nobody reached out to him, so therefore any objections to his work were meritless. That's how he has put it.

JeanHead then went on further implying that those people had criticisms of his work that were grounded on bigotry, and racism.

You did imply that there was sabotage of his work without merit, when you said that that the leadership were opposing his work, and the direction it was taking. That is not really known. By the post linked today, it is entirely possible there were merely objections about this being a keynote and nothing beyond that.

Here's David explaining why he thought that talk shouldn't be a keynote:

> I expressed forceful skepticism that the compile-time introspection work, which I had been passively following with great interest, would achieve a state that would be suitable for a RustConf keynote in time for 2023 RustConf, for lack of adequate lang team iteration (neither for the Rust Foundation grant selection, nor conference presentation) to land well with the RustConf audience.

Here is JeanHeyd claiming this is a meritless objection, and in fact merely revealing how much a big ego he has:

> Imagine putting blood sweat and tears into your event and it's just casually dismissed as a "tier 2". You know, the place where things that aren't ready like my "not supposed to be a keynote" goes.

Here's JeanHeyd claiming this is what "his is the best they could put together", implying there's no truth to David's explanation, and therefore saying that it is meritless.

> The rest of it, is of course, also bullshit. Trying to conflate Yoshua's struggles as a reason to paint over my work entirely and make it seem like it wasn't ready to present is a personal shortsight of his, and him projecting his inadequacy on me is absolutely bonkers. This is the best they could put together after 3 months of this absolute nonsense?

I feel you could have got my point on my previous comment.


On the topic of our commenting patterns here on HN, since you brought up mine... I just noticed that your account was created in 2017 but you have literally never commented anywhere, ever, nor submitted anything, before you came here to dunk on JeanHeyd. That's kinda odd. Not that it's wrong or invalidates what you're saying, I just found it strange.


Is there a certain quota I have to have to comment on a post? Or are you just to poison the well, by going over my comment history?

> Not that it's wrong or invalidates what you're saying

I'm glad you realise that.


I'm not trying to poison the well. I legitimately found it weird, and I figured it wasn't out of place to bring up since you had already brought up my commenting patterns. If I offended you I apologize.


it's very weird of you to basically only call out the above user's actions of... being in the thread, and not the actual merits of what they're saying.

many of us will laugh at you as well, because you don't add anything to the conversation but pretend like you do


[flagged]


You can't just accuse someone of going scorched earth on others for technical criticism, without backing that up. Talk about a specific instance where he has done that, ideally with links.

Just throwing accusations at people the way you're doing is actually a really shitty thing to do. Even if he was 100% guilty of all the things you claim, your conduct is not acceptable.


> going scorched earth on others for technical criticism

I said JeanHeyd doesn't appreciate technical criticism, and I said he goes full scorched earth on others. However, I mentioned both in separate sentences. Please don't twist my words. You are the one linking them both, suggesting that one happened due to the other, when in fact I was merely describing aspects of his nasty personality in general, with no suggestion that this was the path this drama developed.

In this particular rust drama, JeanHeyd's pettiness caused him to go scorched earth over a perceived slight, once his talk was downgraded to a less prestigious slot. I have reiterated this over and over in several comments with you, and you keep twisting what I'm saying.

JeanHeyd, and also you in another comment have claimed that there was a grand conspiracy to sabotage his work with no evidence whatsoever. The only fact in all this controversy is that he had a talk downgraded. Not even cancelled.

> Just throwing accusations at people the way you're doing is actually a really shitty thing to do

You should start practicing what you preach. How about providing evidence that JeanHeyds work was being sabotaged without merit? Or you just accuse others without evidence?

Next time, stop changing what others are saying. Your conduct is not acceptable.


I have not accused anyone of sabotaging his work.


> The very source of this issue is that there were apparently people in the leadership who took serious issues with the direction of the compile time proposal, but were seemingly unwilling to have the discussion about technical merits.

Here you are doing just that. You don't have evidence for this claim. All that happened was that his talk got downgraded. That's it.


The talk got downgraded due to one high-up person's serious issues with the talk, that person's concerns weren't made public, the identity of the person who had the concerns wasn't made public. Those are the facts. (Source: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-rustconf-keynote-fiasco... ctrl+f concerns)

I admit that I assumed that those concerns were technical (i.e "issues with the direction of the compile time proposal"). I don't have evidence for that, because the concerns weren't made public.

Anyway, you're the one who's choosing to view their actions as sabotage of his work, I don't think I would characterize it like that.

EDIT: I want to add, it's possible that this person who had great concerns was dtolnay and that the concerns were simply what he outlines in this post (essentially just that it wasn't ready to be featured in a keynote; source: https://gist.github.com/dtolnay/7f5da4bf057b7c6d0d00c6bed306... ctrl+f "I expressed forceful skepticism"). I hope that's not the case, since that's a really weak reason to retract a keynote invitation weeks after it was given, and seems like it could be easily solved with some disclaimers... but we can't know, since, again, nobody has publicly disclosed what the concerns were which caused the talk to be downgraded.


That article you linked is pretty biased. Having said that, you cannot imply that there was a conspiracy to stop JeanHeyd's work in the rust leadership, and then say that I'm claiming sabotage.

> The problem is, this isn't "drama in the Rust community", this is repeated gross incompetence and malevolence spanning years from the very top of Rust leadership.

There you are again ascribing motivations you don't know to the rust leadership.

On the topic of having a keynote downgraded, this happens all the time. Speakers also get disinvited. What is atypical here, is having a personal army to relentless harass others online, force people to resign, etc.

A talk got downgraded. He wasn't disinvited. His honour wasn't disabused. Only a person with an insanely inflated ego would go on to write some many blog posts about it, demanding the heads of others.


Makes me want to distance myself from ever delving into the language knowing this is the drama the culture is engaging in.


You can still enjoy the language without engaging in this drama. I only know about this because it's on the front page of HN (maybe I'm living under a rock) and yet the language still works nicely and I enjoy writing it immensely.


The problem is, this isn't "drama in the Rust community", this is repeated gross incompetence and malevolence spanning years from the very top of Rust leadership. It's completely warranted to let that affect your decision about whether to rely on that language (and hence its leadership) or not.


Drama like this has influence on language evolution, on this specific context, reflection work from ThePHD was stopped and his employer withdrawn from all ongoing Rust efforts.

Dramas in Python and C++ communities also had similar side effects on the people that were involved, and withdraw their contributions.


Just imagine how hard would it be to write in e.g. Python 3 otherwise, sheesh.


Drama is unavoidable. People are imperfect. They have different opinions and priorities. Miscommunication happens. People unintentionally cause grave offenses. Sometimes they fail to convey the intended tone over text messages. Sometimes a single malicious person throws a huge wrench into a delicate mechanism.

There's really no way around it, any big project is going to have some amount of drama. Good projects find a way to manage it and make corrections to keep the project on track, but conflict and dysfunction can't be entirely avoided.


I've seen enough drama for one lifetime in the Python, Rust and Scala communities.

Surprised I didn't see more in Java over the decades but I suspect that's because those old Sun/Oracle guys would prefer to go fishing than argue about who is more woke or whose agenda is more insidious.


Do not assume that just because you are unaware of conflict that there is none to be had! Specifically, there was tons of conflict in Java, you just didn't see any of it: JavaSoft was infamously political inside Sun, and the HotSpot vs. Exact VM civil war was as hot as any that I have seen in my career.


There's plenty drama in serious organizations as well. It just tends not to be public.

You're very naive if you think at a place like Oracle there's no conflict, rivalries, and bitter arguments.

At my previous job we had enough drama that the police showed up at the office. Over a year we had screaming, insults, people climbing on the desk and throwing a monitor, and people in management getting into a serious fist fight with a broken nose. Plus a colorful employee who couldn't get his mind out of the gutter and apparently corporate property theft.

That was one surreal year, I've got to say, after which I changed jobs.

Only none of that happened on a public mailing list, so the only place where you'll hear even a hint of that is here from me.


Python etc drama has historically been strong arguments about the future of various parts of the language. This is way different, this is bickering, personal attacks etc. I have nothing against healthy criticism and debate focused on making the project stronger, but this is unprofessional and not something I want to be adjacent to.


The seriousness of this "drama" is hard to judge, really. On an "unserious" side all of this could be easily explained that adult nerds are compensating for their lack of drama in high school, because they were socially excluded and skipped this developmental part. OR, a more serious explanation would be they are going through growing pains of a new decentralized governance model and all of this "drama" is a process of ironing out communication issues, which is actually quite awesome for us, as a society. But the reality is somewhere in between or a mix of both.


I'm assuming it is unserious, the use of the word "fiasco" is a tell. The fact that it's unserious but still made into a big fuss is an even bigger warning sign in my eyes to steer clear.


Well thephd dev is part of C comittee. Here's to hoping he won't generate drama there.


You seem to have a bone to pick with him, but he's certainly not the originator of this drama, and there's plenty of other drama which the Rust Project and Rust Foundation has managed to generate with absolutely no involvement from ThePHD at all.

You're literally victim blaming here.


> You seem to have a bone to pick with him, but he's certainly not the originator of this drama.

No. Not with him in particular at least. I have bone to pick with people not applying Hanlon's razor, and attributing various fun conspiracies to people and spreading via social media.

And he might not be the exact originator, but he is now the main propagator of it.

In any case time will tell.


This entire debacle is souring me quite a bit on Rust. Can anyone recommend a fork that doesn’t have a “death by a thousand committees” feel to it? I’d rather deal with one extremely opinionated project lead than whatever… this is.


What makes you think that you, as a user of a language, need to "deal" with the project lead in either case? That's not the case for 99.9999% of the community.


As users, we need to deal with the consequences of this drama. Like the work on introspection no longer moving forward. This work really could have improved on many situations where we currently abuse macros (which are a hack and slow).


1) A fork isn't going to resolve that issue

2) It would cause many other ones

3) C, C++, and Zig aren't getting this feature any time soon either

I certainly wish all of this had been handled much differently, but I'm not seeing how your response is a rational one.




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