this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Phoronix's comment section is as toxic as it can be, but i found out a comment that puts into words better similar thoughts I have on this:
I'd only add that it's not only about the kernel - they are home to a project that could be in the medium-long term a serious alternative to Google's blink/Apple's webkit, and of course an alternative to the hegemony of Chrome, but they actively chose to just not give them a single cent. Yes I am talking about Servo.
People like to be on commitees to feel important. The issue becomes what their role should actually be. Unfortunately donors end up on commitees and part of the decision making process. They have their own motivations and incompetencies.
It really isn't that simple though. Rust's compiler isn't stable because the language itself is still being improved. This type of thing will only improve as adoption increases and real-world problems get ironed out. You can't just throw money and devs at it and expect the problem to be solved.
It's also not like the developers don't care about compile time, but the nature of the language (strict compiler checks which catch things before runtime) will inherently lead to something slower that other languages' compilers. There are probably still improvements they can make, but it's not as simple as just deciding to rewrite/revamp it and expecting massive speedups.
Every time Rust takes forever to compile something, I picture in my mind it checking every possible edge case and buffer vulrnability I didn't check and suddenly I'm a lot more okay with how long it takes.
Then nobody will throw money at any project at all, because everything eventually will be solved by "magick".
Destinating more resources to that quickens and makes better that process, though, incentivating people to work on it and test it.
It's not magic, it's adoption rates. I'm not saying the money or resources are useless, but as it is right now, I think more people would benefit from actually trying to use rust in more large-scale projects (like R4L, windows, android, redox, servo, etc.) and using that experience to inform actual language development. I don't think it makes sense to do a full revamp of the compiler until projects like those are actually proven. In the meantime it makes more sense to allocate funding/dev resources to those projects (or at least the open source ones)
That's one of the reasons why you get delayed or cancelled, over-budget projects that go nowhere. ( another big one is corruption and general financial shenanigans ).
if you throw a lot of money at a problem/project that doesn't have reasonable management and competent understanding of where that money could work efficiently then you're asking for trouble.
That is charmingly naive, in my experience.
I'm not saying more money wouldn't help, I'm saying throwing money at it isn't generally a stand-alone solution, which is what i think the person you were replying to was trying to say.