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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Speaking of software conspiracy theories, My favorite conspiracy theory is the whole Woke Rust thing. There is an attempt to replace C/C++ with Rust as THE programming language, while at the same time Rust's council is full of the wokes. That whitehouse statement doesn't alleviate my paranoia in the slightest.

I like going to Rust events and trying to guess if someone is a very ugly woman or a tranny. Usually the second

Avoid this kind of low-effort sneering.

I genuinely go to many Rust events and this is something I really experienced at every single one of them. But sure

How does the fact that Rust has a 'woke' council credibly threaten ... anything to do with the programming language (end user experience, developer experience writing in it, etc)? What does the council even do I guess is my question.

There's some casual drama, but a lot of the concern as an outsider depends on exactly how paranoid you are.

Rust's governance is complex, but it can be roughly understood under a hierarchy where the the Leadership Council determines what consists of membership of each Leader's content-specific teams, and each Team's membership controls what RFCs will be accepted by their respective areas of focus: in practice, the members on the Leadership Council generally at least have eyes-on for any serious RFC. (This structure is post-2022; there was some weird drama with the moderation vs core leaders in 2021 that afaik has never been aired publicly).

In theory, this should just mean that material goals, changes, or fixes to compilers or core libraries are likely to reflect the material goals of the Rust Foundation, which is pretty standard, even if not always so explicit.

In practice, there is a very distinct philosophy about community interaction, in the sense that it has a direction. So far, most of this tends to just be intracommunity drama stuff that doesn't impact casual devs and maybe even non-turbo-Red-Tribers who did seek an RFC, but the classical lodestones for principled behavior have been the presence of Palantir devs inside the governance structure. There is definitely a segment that believes that needs to change. (and tbf).

At the moderately paranoid level, Rust is Apache-MIT minus a bunch of copyright cruft (and some other licensing for LVVM), and rust-lang has been aggressive about copyright enforcement in the past. On top of the ugly questions about how much these licenses can really limit the management from changing them in the future, or even bind seriously, if Rust does something like an ethical use license or a common crate requires all users to have a Rust Trans Flag displayed in UI-presenting code. (edit: as an example, a proposed trademark policy (cw: gdocs link) last year required Rust-trademark-bearing conferences to "prohibit the carrying of firearms, comply with local health regulations, and have a robust Code of Conduct." and Rust-trademark-bearing free swag to be "in good taste and compatible with the values of the Project." -- it largely got dropped for other reasons.)

At the aggressively paranoid level, you start to think about changes you might not notice.

Wait, what’s so bad about palantir?

To steelman (and this is something I've seen in the wild, albeit sometimes buried in other arguments), Palantir is a barely-private-sector defense industry asset, and very close to just being an unofficial part of the US government's intelligence agencies due to its funding sources. A Palantir-employed dev has a lot of motivation to insert esoteric vulnerabilities and less than ideally secure settings tracking opportunities; a Palantir-employed governance council member and especially leader has a lot of motivation to recognize RFCs that would include those. This sorta attack is known to have happened to RSA during Operation Orchestra, and remains popular (though denied) for Heartbleed.

To... be less than perfectly charitable, Palantir's use by ICE is controversial: Actual Rust Programmers consider the organization somewhere along "proven to act out genocide against immigrants", and the business's relationship with domestic policing falls into similar lines.

There's been other lower-profile efforts aimed at other development-related businesses -- there's similar drama everywhere from colleges to FIRST to FOSS stuff about Raytheon RTX funding, for one that's moved things at margins -- but for Rust Palantir's funding is one of the big obvious lodestones that both the pro- and anti- side pretty clearly see as the culture war point.

It doesn't help that Rust is actually a good language (though I won't pretend it's perfect) while still enabling C/C++ levels of performance. Wokes got in on the ground floor of what is likely the future of systems programming. I mean it's possible something like Zig could win in the long run but given the Linux kernel adopting Rust and Microsoft beginning to use it for important parts of Windows it's hard to see it losing with that kind of momentum.

But even alternatives like Zig are going to attract plenty of weirdos. Interest in low level computing and being a weirdo seem to go hand in hand, just look at how 90% or more of prominent emulator developers seem to be trans and/or furries. Even the more normal ones are still massive weebs.

Zig died to me when the lead developer came out with a declaration of intent to ban (full-fledged) recursion or at least discourage it using cumbersome syntax (the proposal appears to have been shelved, but only with a "we'll come for you eventually when the time and Overton Window are ripe" note). Every modern language seems to have at least some domain in which the programmer is deliberately hobbled in the name of "safety"/his betters' strongly-held opinions about what he should and shouldn't do.

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