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Tuesday 29 June 2021

Why did Graydon Hoare leave rust?

 I didn't. At least, not the way that sentence characterizes the timeline.

I burnt out; ran out of emotional energy to be effective in my role as technical lead for the project mid way through 2013 (at the tail end of my divorce, and while recovering from a surgery -- not a great time in my life), so I took a break, switched off the Rust team, took a year to work on lower-profile and less-time-sensitive projects inside Mozilla (test-farm automation for Firefox-on-Android at first; later the wifi-and-cell geolocation service), eventually quit Mozilla and worked for a completely unrelated payment network (Stellar) doing a distributed transaction processor for another year and a half, then finally in early 2016 got a call from someone at Apple saying they were looking for some folks to help with Swift (in a non-leadership position, which I prefer).

It's got nothing at all to do with an assessment of the relative merits of the languages. I like Rust a lot, and still consider it a very important technical contribution to the landscape (in the sense of a successful technology transfer from research to industry, prioritizing memory safety and data-race safety for systems programmers -- see my comments on this matter here). I'm also thrilled to see the community develop to such a broad and healthy extent: both the wide ecosystem of libraries, the quite broad ownership of the language and compiler codebase itself, and the extent to which the community emphasizes beginner-friendliness, simplicity, helpfulness, approachability, mentoring, documentation, outreach, and yes even its battle-weary code of conduct (which you can blame me for if you are looking for someone to blame). IMO these are all great things, and I think Rust will always have a special place in my heart given the unusually intense effort I put into its first 7 or so years.

But: I don't think Rust is the last or only language that needs to exist. Indeed, I think there's quite a lot of work left to do on languages before anyone could credibly argue such things about any language. I've always been a language pluralist -- picture my relationship towards languages like a kid enjoying a wide variety of building blocks, musical instruments or plastic dinosaurs -- and I don't think evangelism or single-language puritanism is especially helpful.

More specifically: I like Swift too! I even said so when it was released. It has a bunch of qualities that Rust lacks (the clang importer, reflection, a repl and playgrounds, runtime-dynamic generics, keyword arguments, cleanly-integrated reference-typed classes, user-extensible pattern matching, simplified local borrow-like alias control, compiler-supported ARC, generally much lower cognitive load) and an overall different area of focus (mostly user-facing, UI-centric app development, so far). In many ways, it took things that Rust tried to do early in its life and ran with them, rather than changing course in the same places Rust did; there's a lot of familiar pieces. I'm happy Swift exists too, and I'm happy to be working on it. Various members of the Rust and Swift teams know each other, talk to one another, trade ideas and implementation insights, and generally coexist peacefully; and they're both fantastic groups to work with. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work in both projects.

[–]IngvarrEm[S] 11 points  

Dear Graydon, I appreciate such a sincere answer, thank you. I also thank you for the Rust. You are the great engineer, I wish you all the best! Both in personal life and in your work and creations.

[–][deleted] 5 points  

can I take a moment to thank you for that juicy "What Next" link? It's a trove of information!

I'm a lang design fan and will greatly enjoy looking at some of those topics, which you list quite nicely.

[–]coder543 49 points  

Have you ever worked on a project for years and years?
It's nice to change things up, to work on something else.

Has Apple ever offered you unimaginable sums of money?
It's hard to imagine refusing the kind of offer Apple would make to someone like Graydon.

No, Graydon does not think Rust sucks and Swift is so much better.

He's not the only one from the early days working for Apple these days.

[–]dochtmanAskama · Quinn · imap-proto · tokio-imap 24 points  

Plus, I could see how it might be attractive to not work in a project where you have to wear the responsibility of being the big inventor/BDFL/oracle type, after so many years.

[–]__s 13 points  

I've seen Gankro complain before when he shoots out an idea, or gives some criticism, that he has to worry his word is going to be taken as ultimate truth, but he's just pissing out what's off the top of his head, wanting discussion

[–]fgilcherrust-community · rustfest 12 points  

To my knowledge, that definitely has to do with. Graydon is around and can be seen on this subreddit from time to time, but usually doesn't comment on language details if they are not historic.

[–]est31 19 points  

We got Gankro back so that's a thing at least :).

[–]po8 14 points  

Not sure why you're asking us. Graydon would probably know.

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