I made claims based on what I (and everyone else) could see in rust.git; I have no reason to be either overtly pessimistic or overtly optimistic. At the end of the day, the proof is the pudding (aka. code): we are only debating facts, not hypotheticals.
Either way, it was an interesting read. Sure, I took a karma hit for saying unpopular things, and people feel sour/ hurt/ [insert irrational emotion here]; that's fine. Nevertheless, I hope the criticism helped think about some issues.
For example, when you learn new information like "there's a tracing GC in progress" and you want to look at the source code, you could choose to say "Oh, cool! I didn't know that. Could you give a link with more information or source?" instead of lecturing the other commenter about how they are Doing Open Source Wrong.
He asked me why I thought Rust would've live for long, and I spent hours reading the code and writing a detailed coherent comment to the best of my ability. He dismisses my comment as "FUD" [2] and responds with one-liners. The final comment with a link to his blog with colorful graphs was terribly condescending. Him being a lead developer doesn't mean squat to me: a bad argument from him is still a bad argument.
No, I'm not going to stoop to begging for scraps: if I wanted to do that, I'd be using proprietary software; Apple or Microsoft nonsense. In this world, the maintainer is the one who has to take the effort to educate potential contributors. He is clearly doing a terrible job, and I pointed that out.
No, I never accused him of lying. I accused him of making a bad argument, and not giving me sufficient information to post a counter-argument, which is exactly what he did.
And no, I did not "defend" my original argument: I posted a fresh review of fresh code (the one in src/libstd/rt, as opposed to the one in src/rt).
On the point of tone. Yes, I've spent many years on harsh mailing lists and my language is a product of that experience. Are you going to discriminate against me because of that, irrespective of the strength of the argument?
I will repeat this once more: the only currency in a rational argument is the strength of your argument; don't play the authority card.
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/commits/master?author=artagn...
https://github.com/graydon/rust/tree/gc-prefix
> Learn to treat people with respect
I don't really want to draw out this argument, but I called your reply FUD because you were claiming things that were not true, such as that we cannot implement tracing GC.