Comment by scottlamb

> - "an upstream language community which refuses to make any kind of backwards compatibility guarantees" -> Rust has a stability guarantee since 1.0 in 2015. Any backwards incompatibilities are explicitly opt-in through the edition system, or fixing a compiler bug.

The most charitable interpretation I can imagine is that the Rust-in-Linux project needs specific nightly features, and those don't get stability guarantees. But I think this is still pretty unfair to complain about; my impression is there's a lot of appetite on the Rust side to get those stabilized.

I also think...

> we know, through very bitter experience, that 95+% of the time, once the code is accepted, the engineers which contribute the code will disappear, never to be seen again.

...that while there's truth in this, there's also a large extent to which it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone might want to stick it out to get their work into mainstream once, but then take a look at the process once it's in the mirror and say never again.

...and:

> Instead of complaining about maintainers for who are unreasonably caring about these things, when they are desparately under-resourced to do as good of a job as they industry demands, how about meeting us half-way and helping us with these sort of long-term code health issues?

It's really hard for me to not see "let's actually write down the contract for these functions, ideally via the type system" as doing exactly that. Which seems to me to be the central idea Ted Ts'o was ranting about in that infamous video.