[coffeeblack]

Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees.

This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and develop it into different directions. Both code and organization. And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others strife.

[porcoda]

I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple groups without having to know how all of the different variants interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95 language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific extensions and implementation choices.

I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that builds them. But at least establish a common language in which to build that diverse ecosystem.

It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized things in the first place!)

[mschuster91]

> It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants?

For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another, Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique subset/superset and edge cases.

[andrewstuart]

>> "How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer"

There’s a fresh new level of hell I hope I don’t get sent to for my sins when my time is up.

[cgh]

Pascal (eg Turbo Pascal) vs Super Pascal vs Object Pascal also springs to mind.

[exitb]

Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.

[wongarsu]

C++ survives having a GCC variant and a MSVC variant, not to mention whatever half-broken compiler you used to get for your microcontroller code.

I would argue the requirement is that each compiler is a stable project. But one language can have multiple compilers that aren't 100% compatible and implement slightly different subsets of the language (as long as there's a common subset libraries can choose to stick to)

[jacquesm]

Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of long term software development is absolutely astounding, especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your dirty laundry out of the public eye if you really care about Rust.

[yarg]

There is a vast chasm between enterprise and toy.

A thing does not need to be enterprise level to be useful or even very useful.

[johnisgood]

Toy... well, similarly to that of most Rust rewrites of long-established stable projects.

[epolanski]

I share the spirit.

OSS is all about forking.

My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way he prefers for whatever reasons.

[jacquesm]

Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.

[smarnach]

The thing is, nothing is developed in a different direction here. The fork simply merges upstream changes, and has no current plans of revert introducing any technical differences. It's a spoon, not a fork.

I think it's an important aspect of free software that it can be forked. That doesn't me we need to celebrate all forks. Some are great. Some cause more harm than good. But most are simply irrelevant. This one appears to be in that last category.

[coffeeblack]

What made you think that you "need" to "celebrate" anything?

Who told you that? Weird choice of words.

[kaba0]

If there is no real weight behind a fork than it is either useless, or might even be a detriment to the whole by fracturing the ecosystem. I feel this is the latter kind.

[alkonaut]

The downside to open source is the confusion around what's the latest, what's "most official", what's compatible with what.

In 99% of cases having one project however bad it is, means less confusion and more stability than several (It's funny and scary how this is exactly the one and only argument for dictatorship).

For the good of the project long term, evolution through selection might be best. But it's certainly not best for the short to medium term if talent is split, and it's not great for users to have to wonder which fork to use.

[taneq]

Yep, it’s amazing how fast “it’s oss, if you don’t like it just fork it and make your own version” turns into “you forked it?! angery”

[scns]

This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.

[sillymath3]

There is a blog post by Peter Seibel: Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.

It has inspired other posts, for example (2)

As a hobby Lisper I learned about Peter Seibel as the author of Practical Common Lisp.

(1) https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ (2) https://medium.com/@danonrockstar/let-a-thousand-flowers-blo...

[dijit]

Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom".

That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system then obtaining in Communist China.

The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in February 1957, is:

"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."

[coffeeblack]

About what? That phrase, that was just a trick by the Chinese Communists to find and kill millions of its critiques?

[topspin]

Agreed. I have no respect for the concern trolling about whatever hypothetical damage this supposedly does. If the Rust 'community' is so fragile that this toy fork is an actual problem then there is something fundamentally broken about Rust and its community.

[jevgeni]

This is not about code, it's about standards. As long as I don't have to have 2 Rusts to deal with, I'm fine with this, but right now at least the branding isn't supporting that.

[reaperman]

If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust, then that’s where I’m putting my energy too.

I believe they’re hugely responsible for most of the adoption of Rust and have no doubt they’d see continued success anywhere they choose.

[zeteo]

Maybe it will develop into a true fork as you say. Right now it seems rather aimed towards influencing the committee in favor of a different type of monoculture.