Sure, but from my perspective (you probably had better insight into these companies involvement than me) there was always a question about how committed companies this large really are when they only have a few projects in the language. Hiring core developers puts all doubts to bed (and also the kind of investment that actually for counts for something).
As someone who has lived through hype cycles, big companies can pull the rug just as quickly on these investments as they’ve made them. While this does indicate a more serious interest, it’s not nearly the safety net you think.
To the contrary, a bunch of FAANG driven contributions tend to make projects focused too much on particular use cases. Go’s clusterfuck of package management is entirely because Google doesn’t do package management.
> a bunch of FAANG driven contributions tend to make projects focused too much on particular use cases
This is one of the challenges we have, as a project, in this next phase of its life: make sure that we are helping organizations achieve their goals, while not allowing it to be totally directed by them. Rust governance is set up to be resilient to takeovers by any one organization, but we're now playing with some of the most powerful organizations on the planet. We're glad to have them, but we do have to make sure that we make Rust what we want it to be, and not purely what various large tech companies want it to be. It's a delicate balance.
From my perspective, the size of the companies has little to do with the relative risk of outcomes that are not the best for the common good. I've seen folks at small companies try to control or unduly influence open-source software, and I've seen folks that work at large companies do it too.
At the end of the day, I think it comes down to the actions of people directly involved in a community, and the culture that they collectively cultivate. I'm optimistic that being intentional in this makes for a very resilient project and community.
Absolutely. And I am very happy to see Amazon and others contribute to Rust. I think everyone involved has good intentions, and for that I’m very greatful.
Disclosure: I work at Amazon where I build AWS infrastructure
This is where I think mindful investments in building and maintaining a diverse community of developers and users is especially important for a system component like a programming language. From my perspective, this is an important feature of Rust that we should seek to maintain (as I've mentioned before elsewhere [1]).
It took them like a decade to get there though, all the while telling the entire non-Google world that they must be doing something wrong if they want versioning for their dependencies.
The problem was that there were no dependency solutions at the time that really nailed it. Most systems used something similar to Ruby's Bundler system, which was terrible to work with. Personally I like that the Go team is patient and takes the long view when adding features to the core tool set and language.
That was never the position and lots of third party tools sprung up to make things work once the vendor folder was added in Go 1.5. That was three years after the language was released.
The current version module system is built on a decade of anguish that finally toppled over and forced some serious interest. The problem is that it was a complete non-issue for Google because of the monorepo so the golang devs employed by Google severely downplayed the problem.
It definitely is a significant increase in support, all I'm saying is that it's a difference of intensity, not of kind, that is, it's not going from "no support" to "support" but from "support" to "lots of support."
Very happy to see this happening, for all the reasons you cite.
I think most of these companies have had a pretty large investment, they're just not really open about it in many cases. So yeah, it's a pretty visible signal, but the investments they had already were much larger ones. A team of core developers is a pretty small investment compared to having a ton of teams all over the place, which most of them had already.
