thagsimmons

C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot about pattern languages, and coding, but the Wiki idea and the way the community operated is something I still think about today.

C2 was a utopian vision of well-informed, kind, co-operative people working together in a radically open and egalitarian way. And it really did work, for a while. Unfortunately, the reasons why C2 ultimately died have been obscured by a well-meaning process of pruning that I think is meant to remove the "bad stuff" and leave only the "good stuff" for posterity. This is a shame, because the truth really is instructive - a few very prolific, toxic, borderline delusional people started dominating the wiki to the extent that more reasonable contributors just moved on. The C2 community started with an assumption that everyone could be reasoned with, and tried to handle the situation kindly and rationally. It was amazing to see the damage a very small number of people - basically just two - could do to a whole community of hundreds of well-meaning but naive people. It got to the point where there were pages dedicated to trying to think about the problems these people posed, with endless discussions about the paradox of tolerance and handling things through openness and kindness, and small factions arguing for permanent bans. Ultimately I think both badd actors _were_ banned, but by then it was too late - all the air was sucked out of the community. Watching the death of C2 unfold really darkened my view about the prospects of truly open societies, and deeply informed work that I've done on building communities since.

Today, nearly all signs of the way this devastation played out have been erased from history. If you search for the names of the malignant characters there are a few mentions here and there, but there's no way to piece together the true sequence of events. I think an important part of C2's story, and one that is more relevant today than ever, has been lost as a consequence. I'm sure Ward has the full edit history of the wiki around, and I think he should publish it, complete and unvarnished, so we can study it and learn from it.

We chose sqlx for a SQLite based project because it provides a reasonable async interface, and our experience has not been great. Development momentum has been poor, PRs and issue reports are languishing, the developer is unresponsive to ergonomic and technical feedback, sqlite doesn't seem to be a priority, and the fundamental mechanism for compile-time query validation is very, very flawed. As our project has become more important to us, we've become more and more tempted to write our own SQLite library (maybe forking some parts of sqlx).

The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately apparent when you ask if people functionally have the ability to speak freely from within US institutions of academia, journalism, or large corporations. I work with colleagues in all of these from all over the world, and nobody is more afraid of saying the wrong thing and having their lives ruined than Americans. The fear is palpable and ever-present. So again, how successful has the first amendment really been here? The frequent response to this is "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", which is exactly the kind of legalistic attitude we have to get away from. Real freedom of speech means exactly the ability to say controversial things without suffering disproportionate harm, and I just don't think the US is doing markedly better than the rest of the free world on this front.

Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China, India, Africa, the Pacific and so on give one iota of a damn about US law is completely absurd. Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.

My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional rights. The principles of free speech are universal, much more important and much broader than the US constitution. There are many ways to foster and promote free speech that has nothing to do with US law. Yes, we're often discussing US companies when this topic comes up, but you should realise that people outside the United States are not covered by US constitutional guarantees, and US companies don't treat us like we are. We must foster a discussion where the principles of free speech are seen to be important outside of this narrow, legalistic, US-centered sense.

This is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question. It depends on the developer workstation, which file they're currently working on, etc. That said, we're talking about incremental compile times here, not total project from-scratch compile times. A lag of a few seconds really makes a difference to developer comfort - I'd say, when it's an issue, we're talking about rust-analyzer responsiveness (mainly due to cargo check on save, which can be disabled) of a 3-8 seconds, and delays in running unit tests of 5-20 seconds. I work on a super beefy ThreadRipper monster so I'm less affected, but colleagues on under-powered laptops suffer a lot.

While there was some stink around his departure, he's not one of the contributors I'm concerned about here. I'm thinking more of people working on deep technical issues around the language and type system.

This is absolutely a pain point for us, working on a very large Rust project. In particular, incremental compile times are absolutely critical for developer comfort, and by far the most common complaint working on our codebase is that developer tooling, IDEs and running unit tests is slow. We've done everything that can reasonably be done - splitting the project into crates, using mold as a linker (the single biggest improvement), etc. Without a really big improvement to incremental compile, we will have a continuing drag on our development momentum.

This sounds great, but I don't think Rust has the complement of highly skilled core developers needed to tackle something this ambitious. I'm a close observer of the Rust project, and my impression is that Rust's core development team has been hollowed out over the past few years - there's been a string of quiet departures, which sadly included some of the most powerful contributors. The Rust project is quite secretive and opaque about its internal politics, so I don't know if there's any unified reason for the attrition, and I don't think it's useful to try to read the tea leaves. At this point, I'm just keen to be reassured that Rust has the momentum to complete things like async and shore up holes in the type system on a reasonable timescale.

I'm very interested in this area, but I've never been able to get a handle on what's going on in this particular project. There's no coherent explanation of the technical aspects, no documentation, hours and hours of rambling videos, the repository linked from the site is an unstructured grab-bag that revealed nothing enlightening after 15 minutes of rooting around in it. There's also a lot of far-fetched, hubristic ideas and mumbo-jumbo that doesn't pass the sniff test for me. I get whiffs of Terry Davis-style outsider art.

On the other hand, he seems to have an academic pedigree and has presented at serious conferences, so it might be that there's something interesting here that I'm missing. I just can't tell - if anyone else is more enlightened, I'd be interested to hear about it.