> entire rust team was recently fired from Mozilla
This is completely incorrect, verging on FUD. Mozilla had very few people working full-time on Rust; of the people who were laid off in the recent wave, the ones working on projects adjacent to Rust were working on Servo or WASM-related codebases. In particular, the person at Mozilla who was most central to Rust development, Niko Matsakis, is still employed there and still working full-time on Rust.
They're moving to a Rust Foundation with corporate sponsorship model. I think Rust will be fine, even Amazon expressed interest in sponsoring development.
System languages don't grow on trees. Rust has had a lot of non-trivial effort put into it and is very usable right now. Somebody is going to see the value just lying around and is going to pick up the financial slack.
I see it as vaguely analogous to the current movie theater situation in the US. A lot of companies are seeing the end of their business, but all of those buildings are still sitting around waiting for someone to swoop in and buy them for fire sale prices.
It's a factually incorrect comment: the entire Rust team was not fired from Mozilla.
Does that mean it deserves to be flagged? I didn't flag it. But to be clear, while it does have some opinions, it is also plain incorrect in the facts it asserts.
You can also find, many, many, many comments critical of Rust that are upvoted, let alone not flagged. I wouldn’t extrapolate from a single comment.
It is in a really weird space. However, a lot of the folks involved have chosen to talk about where they're at publicly, and Niko said he was not laid off.
Also, for what it's worth: there's a charitable and uncharitable reading of the comment.
Charitable reading: everyone who was at Mozilla who was paid to work on Rust was laid off.
Non-charitable reading: everyone who was paid to work on Rust was at Mozilla, and was laid off.
HN readers are supposed to follow the principle of charity, but it's quite possible that people either ignored that, or mis-understood the parent as saying the latter, in which case, it feels quite egregiously incorrect, rather than maybe slightly wrong.
The part about the rust team being fired was just incorrect, I downvoted it for that (burying incorrect information tends to avoid it spreading).
Combined with ranting about a spec and a single reference implementation and it looks a hell of a lot more like like intentional flamebait than a misinformed user. They aren't related, are common points raised by known trolls on reddit, and are largely irrelevant. The most popular language in the world is probably python, which has no formal spec. If I had been in a slightly less charitable mood I would have flagged it for this.
