"We moved to GitHub because everyone's already there"

"We shut down the mailing lists because most of our users prefer to use GitLab in their web browser"

"We're rewriting in Rust because we don't really have any non-x86_64 users"

"We're leaving IRC because Discord is more user-friendly"

What all of these arguments have in common is that they exclude people, centralize infrastructure, and eschew free software for proprietary solutions, all in the name of some ill-defined measure of "progress".

@sir Just like with your rage over Mozilla's US v Google press-release, your inclusion of Rust in this otherwise reasonable list is irrational.

Rust is free software, it doesn't force use of centralized infrastructure, and it's not any worse than Go wrt cross-platform compatibility (e.g. https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=hugo&suite=sid vs https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=rust-sequoia-openpgp).

Is your problem with Rust really rooted in its shortcomings as a language, or in Mozilla's decision to integrate Pocket into Firefox in 2015?

@angdraug name all of the architectures you've ever used Rust on

I bet it's x86_64 and maybe arm64. I doubt it includes i686 or even ARMv7.

As someone who actually HAS used Rust on a variety of platforms, I can assure you that its portability story is pretty garbage. Go has, in my experience, been much better in that regard. But it doesn't matter, because this is a strawman: no one is rewriting codebases from Go to Rust. The real alternative that I am talking about here is C.

@sir @angdraug A language which, mind you, is infamous for being flexible enough to be compiled on just about anything you can throw at it (see for example https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-11-15-c-portability.html )

@allison @sir @angdraug You can also go a step higher with a language that has been compiled to C, C++, Java, Ada, and SystemC (off the top of my head) https://xtuml.org/