I believe that's Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook all looking to get involved in core Rust development (I think partially triggered by the Mozilla layoffs). If anybody was still harbouring doubts about Rust's future, now is the time to lay them aside.
If there is anyone here from the rust community, please please please stay away from amazon. There is nothing stopping amazon and aws. Any thing they do is evil. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25196521</a><p>If there is an opencollective somewhere, I am not than happy to give you the money directly. I support Mozilla and Wikipedia and other projects to my best effort, and I would love it if others can do that too.<p>All Amazon has ever done is lip service to open source. There is a multibillionaire at the top with no need for that money who every day costs not to do something good for the planet and is instead enabling commoditizing the general populace.
If they really want to help, the most obvious first step would seem to be to formally adopt and throw some full-time resources at the Rusoto AWS library set for Rust. It's pretty usable right now, but would certainly benefit from the level of testing, helper methods, and language-specific additions that the officially supported AWS libs have.
Related: AWS is building a deep bench of Rust talent [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151056</a>
Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big players with infinite resources.
Having developed and launched a database (TerminusDB) built on a Rust core, this makes me slightly nervous. Feels like the evil empire will bring both great riches and great peril to the fantastic Rust community (part of the reason we picked Rust). Guaranteed sponsors for conferences, but also a certain malignant cynicism (am I being too harsh?). AWS will also aggressively compete for the best talent, which is tricky when you are small and open source.
Twitter previously invested in Scala, which significantly contributed to it's adoption outside of relatively small community back then. Another part of success was Spark.<p>It looks like Rust gains bigcorp support, all we need now is a killer product written in it to kick off explosive growth.
Is Mozilla going to continue sponsoring the Rust project for the forseeable future? After letting servo out [1]<p>> Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed. Now it’s time for Servo to leave the nest!<p>Is there any chance they do the same with the Rust language? Either way, Mozilla has done a huge amount of work to improve the systems programming field, and created an incredible language ecosystem in Rust.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I am not very excited by this.<p>Getting funding and support is great, but the needs of the many are very different than the needs of AWS and Facebook.<p>In my opinion we see this a lot in Linux as well.
What Google wants has almost nothing to do with what I need.
(I said almost).<p>I think it should gestate a while in a less FAANGy environment.
It feels like it was yesterday when HN was praising Tim Bray for quitting Amazon AWS [1] over the firing of whistleblowers. And on the other hand we have what appear to be several prominent Rust community members falling over each other to get hired by Amazon and the Rust HN community largely cheering Amazon.<p>The Rust community seems quite desperate for corporate money and support. Amazon's not paying you out of love fellas, even if it says so in the blog post's title.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon" rel="nofollow">https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-A...</a>
Am I just not "with it?" I don't see the appeal of Rust, but it gets the hottest talk in HN-town.<p>Maybe it's just because I haven't worked long enough with C or C++ to complain about them (only about a decade or so), but I don't have any issues with those languages. And I find it wholly unappealing to abandon the existing corpus of literal decades of knowledge having been poured into those language ecosystems all in the name of whatever it is that Rust delivers on. I just have too much experience in the industry to throw away my time and experiment with something I can't take off the shelf and be productive with from day one.<p>I've also mentioned I just can't stand the way the language looks. It's ugly as sin, and I know I'm not alone in that opinion.<p>I made some crude comments in a previous thread here on HN about Servo, but still came away with the feeling there was literally no one using Servo, the site didn't tell you how to actually use it, and no one cared, but the hype was unreal because it was web tech written in Rust.<p>Edit: The points on this post are fluctuating wildly. If you're interested in Rust, could you share your knowledge with some of us who are on the fence like me instead of downvoting? It doesn't actually help me understand anything about the language or community other than I shouldn't criticize Rust because its users will downvote you.
This is huge for Rust. I always had a love/hate relationship with Rust. Love for the language and runtime characteristics. The lack of stability of the ecosystem combined with the small standard lib and the enthusiats/hobbyist mindset (sorry, but that was my impression) was a show stopper for using it in business apps where Rust could be great but was not strictly necessary.
Rust's popularity really is an incredible phenomenon. Amazon positioning itself as a big user and supporter of Rust is just good business. They do not want someone to appear more of a friend to Rust than they are.
That's great news and will contribute further to Rusts' adoption.<p>Large codebases will be able to transcode to language X at some point in the future and I am waiting for the day when it can be done for Rust with projects like <a href="https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/facebookresearch/TransCoder/</a>
Want to work with Rust?<p>Ockam.io loves Rust, and we are hiring!<p><a href="https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles" rel="nofollow">https://www.ockam.io/team#open-roles</a>
They should pay contributors few millions of dollars each. If they benefited from it they should give meaningful reward. Mouthful words won't suddenly change you from being simply a leech.
So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?<p>I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.