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[return to "The Rust project has a burnout problem"]
1. markph+H4[view] [source] 2024-01-17 13:10:46
>>Philpa+(OP)
This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project. The only thing not included was the comments from overly entitled users that saps whatever morale and energy you have left. Probably best he did not include that though as that is what all discussion would be about.

I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though. Since everyone working on the project is overloaded there is a great feeling of things only get done if you do them.

Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.

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2. mjw100+j8[view] [source] 2024-01-17 13:30:32
>>markph+H4
I think, from observation, that the Rust project has worse burnout problems than most other similarly-sized open source projects.

I'm not sure whether it's more to do with the way the project is organised, the state of the codebase, or the sort of person that's attracted to working on Rust in the first place.

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3. Button+Kf[view] [source] 2024-01-17 14:07:02
>>mjw100+j8
Maybe it's because Rust is new and well designed. People who have adopted it probably care about this and want to maintain it and that's hard. Maybe it's my perfectionism, my desire to build and live in an ivory tower, but I feel this as a Rust user, a fear that they might break some perceived perfection that I care about. I've commented before that "at least C++ developers are free from the burden of using a perfect language", which was me projecting this feeling.
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4. FpUser+Xh[view] [source] 2024-01-17 14:18:03
>>Button+Kf
Rust is far from "perfect" in my opinion as any other language. It tackles couple of particular and important problems but since it can not completely solve it for general case it bends people to think in a certain "perfect" way. Not sure it is ok when one has to jump hoops on what should be perfectly valid and logical code just because compiler can't figure out that it is actually safe.

Also as a generic tool I think it ought to support multiple paradigms and it does not. Just because they (language designers) believe that doing thing their way is superior to what others might find more appropriate does not make them right.

Personally - I would use Rust if clients insists which so far has never been the case, otherwise I would take a subset of C++ any time over.

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