[fatneckbeard]

Yeah I worry about this. There was no "C leadership", it was simple enough that dozens of people created their own compilers within a few years of C existing. this was back before the internet. they had companies sprouting up like Borland just making C compilers for personal home computers. C just ... spread. All these kids learning Arduino in school, they are learning C.

There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed

[xyzzyz]

Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.

[lr1970]

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

No, Rust is winning because it is 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++. Rust incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility. Rust is winning despite its leadership rather than because of it.

EDIT: elaborated a bit more.

[conradev]

These things can be true simultaneously. The Rust team can have extremely strong technical leadership and direction while also being incredibly immature when it comes to conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution is hard! I struggle with it as an engineer who wants to please everyone, but I also recognize that it isn't possible to.

Whoever had objections to the talk and was not able to express those objections to their teammates in the proper forum before taking action without their approval is just... immature. It violated trust amongst the Rust leadership team, and trust is everything.

It’s actually even worse, because this person also wielded enough power to represent Rust to RustConf, and did so incorrectly. They seem problematic.

Leading people is always messy and requires the maturity to deal with failures gracefully, and a catastrophic failure from a simple task is not confidence-inspiring. I love Rust, so I hope they get their shit together.

[snovv_crash]

Rust is winning marketshare because it was built ground-up to take advantage of the massive progression of Moore's Law at compile time. Compiling programs written in Rust would have been completely infeasible 20 years ago, it would have simply been too slow.

[pphysch]

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

Hmm, not sure about that one. Rust has an enormous hype component to it, more than any other language I'm aware of.

It may have strong technical leadership, but saying it's gaining market share "precisely" because of it is precisely misleading.

[deterministic]

Nope. Most languages have strong leadership and zero chance of taking anything from C/C++. And it will takes a very long time for Rust to get even 5% of the C/C++ market. There are more than 6 million C++ programmers out there. And new C++ projects are started every day.

[bluejekyll]

Wouldn’t you consider the C standards committee as the leadership of C?

[pjdesno]

Note that the "C committee" was actually the X3J11 committee of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. In other words, it was just one committee within an organization with a long history of developing cross-industry standards. As such, their job in theory wasn't to invent new technology, but rather to adjudicate between technologies proposed and demonstrated by competing industry vendors.

Like many other modern languages, Rust is a mono-implementation, where the same organization is both developer and standards committee, while at the same time trying to fund itself (without revenue from either standards docs or the compiler) and balance external commercial and non-commercial interests.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but they are very, very different. (and in a world of cutting edge open-source compiler technology, I'm not sure the approach which resulted in ANSI C is even viable today)

[djbusby]

The C committee started after the various compiler implementations. Rust seems to have had the committee before the compiler.