https://lobste.rs/s/sgoshm/serde_is_no_longer_shipping_precompiled#c_5cye7q
Case in point: dtolnay was also the one thus far unnamed by anyone speaking for the project person who was involved in ThePHD’s talk being downgraded from a keynote.
.... Excuse me?
WAIT WAIT WAIT.
Wasn't your work going to make the incredibly bulky existing proc macro infrastructure way less central to the process of building things like Serde to begin with?
It feels like you were working on a problem totally adjacent to the one dtolnay was trying to force adoption of his unpopular solution for.
EDIT: People are seeing this post. I am not a Rust Project member. Evaluate whitequark's opinion based on the level of credibility you assign to whitequark, but don't add any extra credibility to the claim just because I have repeated it.
@pyrex It would have invalidated a large bulk of serde's mechanisms and code, because you would no longer need derives or similar and could introspect code on your own terms rather than needing to globally orchestrate macros, procedural macros, their derivations, and their results in the Rust ecosystem.
I suspect it would probably eliminate a lot of usages of dtolnay's other library, syn.
I would love to hear someone else confirm that dtolnay did this.
I suspect someone may want to figleaf this by saying "it makes sense that the maker of syn would disagree with a technical approach that is very different from what syn did."
This is possible but would be surprising to me because none of the processes of technical criticism happened to you. They kind of happened around you, and the actual reasons for the criticism still have not been made public.
If this is true, it would imply to me that dtolnay just doesn't respect you as a technical contributor at all.
Which begs the question of why.
It's probably not related to your credentials or track record, you have those.
The Rust Project said it's not racism so it can't be racism.
I guess I'll land on "malevolent ghosts"?