Author: Davide Rizzo
Created at: 2025-11-19 17:27
Number: 145
Clean content: I’m a huge fan of this proposal. Thanks everyone for the effort. I volunteer to support in the endeavor in any way needed. The technical details can be discussed in due time, but one thing I’d love is for CPython API to define things around ownership and thread safety more formally. Right now this is delegated to documentation, but both C users and foreign language binding implementers (e.g. Rust and C++) would benefit if they could verify that a certain reference is meant to be owned or borrowed and so on. I understand there are challenges on both the technical and social aspect. I wish for both the aspects to be cared for seriously (and I renew my availability for help). It’s not the first time that adoption of Rust in a big project brings up some strong [1] resistance. I feel that there is space to adequately understand needs and worries; and to empower the people who have some stake in this change to impact the process. For example, some people brought up a worry that Rust is chosen because it’s a trendy toy rather than an actual solution. It’s good to spend time identifying why this is considered a problem, why it is a worry, and what can be done to address it. In part this is being done now (thanks to everyone who took time to answer) by reassuring that there is technical merit and proper research into the solution. But maybe this is not the whole argument and people would like to hear something closer to their worry. In other contexts I’ve seen a resistance to Rust adoption as a sort of threat to job stability (growing as a proficient C programmer takes a huge investment and attention to a number of issues, and something like Rust seems to promise to automate away part of your skill set), and maybe that also needs to be treated with care and empathy. And, on the other side, people wanting to see Rust introduced have their needs (that might not be entirely obvious besides the technical value) and might be faced with walls and gatekeeping and, as it happened in other projects, could be discouraged or burn out when they don’t see those needs understood, or their good will acknowledged. So, please, let’s not disregard that this is a socially loaded topic, and people are already reacting in many ways. I hope that the discussion will be smooth but I will not bet on it. and, sometimes, unexpectedly violent or vicious. Fortunately nothing of that sort is visible on this thread. ↩︎
