Forking Rust

would it be okay if I were to fork Rust? are there any guidelines about forking Rust?

I want to make a language in which Rust programs compile and run (so you benefit from everything in Cargo), but I don’t think my ideas would be a good fit for Rust proper.

(and forking is always a good thing, especially for big projects like Rust)

1 Like

If you want your language to be a strict superset of Rust, wouldn't the easiest and most productive way to prototype it be to write a wrapper around rustc and/or cargo that preprocesses all the .rs files, without actually forking anything?

(also, technically off-topic, but what sort of changes do you have in mind?)

1 Like

Legally speaking, the Apache License version 2.0 or the MIT license allows you to modify the code and distribute your modifications, as long as you follow the requirements in one of these licenses. (You can choose which one to use.) The Apache License includes both a copyright grant and a patent grant.

However, you cannot use the Rust trademarks (including the name "Rust" and the Rust logo) to refer to modified versions of the Rust language without permission:

Distributing a modified version of the Rust programming language or the Cargo package manager and calling it Rust or Cargo requires explicit, written permission from the Rust core team. We will usually allow these uses as long as the modifications are (1) relatively small and (2) very clearly communicated to end-users.

9 Likes

forking is good. I wanna remove (most) semicolons, and also have a strictly anti-discord (the s/texting app), pro-accessibility, pro-hacking (and by extension pro-forking) community.

1 Like

If you want to have your own synax, I suggest adding ability to have syntax translators on top of Rust. It looks like a flavor of whole-module proc_macro could be it:

As for Discord, the Rust team is just trying it out. You don't need to use it either way, so forking the whole project over it seems overly dramatic.

5 Likes

No, Rust doesn’t need extensible syntax, leading to centralization through uh [not sure the term for it, “dark design patterns” maybe?].

We need to decentralize Rust, to avoid the devs becoming too powerful.

We need forks.

As near as I can tell the licenses permit forking. I don’t see why anyone would complain. If you make a better mouse-trap, you’ll catch more mouses. If you don’t, you’ll have dysfunctional traps and be out your time. If you don’t feel that the Rust community is meeting your needs, you can surely start your own fork. I doubt the Rust community forums would be much interested in hearing about it though, because, it would be “Off Topic” by definition.

8 Likes

I'm sensing he meant discord in the sense of "sowing the seeds of discord" or a "discordant melody".

2 Likes

Haha, I forgot these services use real English words. I’ll cut him some Slack then :wink:

12 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.