> Rust is managed by the Rust Foundation
This is not quite true: the Foundation handles things like receiving and distributing some payments, helping conferences, employing people for operations (crates.io), and ownership of the trademark. But Rust the language and toolchain is managed by the people doing the work https://rust-lang.org/governance/
> It’s completely possible that Rust’s compiler contains a backdoor. And nobody would know. Now this last point is highly speculative and conspiratorial,
Yes.
> but I’m not the only one concerned about it.4 The only way to compile Rust’s compiler is using a binary package of the previous version released by the Rust Foundation.
Or using https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc. And it is not released by the Foundation.
> Since there exists only a single fully-functional, usable implementation of
Read the rest
the Rust compiler, the Rust Foundation must be trusted.
> Considering its history, owners, and track record of issues with mismanagement,5
The linked to blogpost is about a fuck up that a subset of people in the project, who were responsible for RustConf, caused. The ones with leadership position stepped down from them out of their own volition. The Foundation in particular had absolutely nothing to do with the whole fiasco.
> I find it hard to trust it at all.
> My suggestion is: slow down. First, the community should focus on improving the Rust language itself instead of trying to “improve” other projects by rewriting them. I propose using that energy to help the GCC Front-End for Rust project6—an alternative compiler which would alleviate the concerns for the possible presence of a backdoor. Currently, it’s in an early phase of development.
Who is the OP talking to? Slow what down? Because there are people working on https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs. I don't work on it, because I do what I do on my spare time and I find it more rewarding to improve the user experience of rustc itself, instead of implementing the same logic for the third time in a language I don't particularly enjoy. Others are equally disinclined to work on a C++ frontend implementation. The project certainly spends its time focused on improving the language. It is also hard to tell people in the Rust Project what to do: it is open source, it is a showupocracy. The people working on it are already at their limit on what responsibilities they can take on.
If the target audience of the blogpost is "the community", I also think it misses the mark. The "X rewritten in Rust" announcements I would see before LLMs would be the projects' own maintainers desiring to use Rust, and not external sources imposing it on others. There have been over enthusiastic people (and trolls) bothering projects in issue trackers and mailing lists, but I've never seen a level of volume commensurate to the meme's fame. (Nowadays I see vibe-coded projects done in Rust, but those are also not imposing their codebase on other existing projects beyond sucking up the air out of the room and making it annoying to read news aggregators due to high volume and low quality).
> And the people associated with Rust often don’t seem to have the best intentions in mind, or are just following a trend without thinking for themselves.
That's quite a view you have of people like myself and my colleagues. I have significant disagreements on how some facts and opinions are framed in the blogpost, but closing with stating that I and my colleagues in the project are ill intentioned and/or don't think for ourselves absolutely ensures that I won't be listening to anything else you have to say in the matter.
Back when Twitter was a thing I'd spend time searching for "negative Rust sentiment" because it was an excellent way of finding unpublished feature requests and real issues that needed to be addressed, after sieving through the less than productive way those real problems were presented with. This latter emotional labor was also the reason that it caused a round of burn out, until I realized that if something is A Problem, more than one person will ultimately hit it. Which means that if there are two people raising the same point, you don't need to waste your time engaging with the one being an asshole, and instead spend your time engaging with the one that will be productive.