Cross-posting my comment from reddit:
Thanks @brson for organizing this whole thing, as well as painstakingly re-reading and summarizing the minutes. I really enjoyed the calls!
From the point of view of the core team, it’s vital to build
connections to people using Rust in diverse contexts and with diverse
backgrounds. These perspectives help us keep in touch with pain points
when using Rust differently than we do, and to stay grounded in
real-world use-cases. That in turn helps focus our efforts to improve
the language, tooling, documentation, and ecosystem.
We collect this feedback in a wide variety of ways, from keeping up
with this subreddit and our discourse forums, to attending meetups and
conferences, to visiting companies interested in Rust. In this
particular case, we wanted to solicit feedback from a range of people
trying out Rust in a more “production” environment, loosely defined. We
wanted to hear about the challenges of using Rust in existing
organizations, integrating with large existing products, and in
on-ramping new engineers, in addition to the general pain points
mentioned above. It was also a chance for users to get to know one
another, since each video call had several different organizations
represented.
For me personally, it was very beneficial to have several hours of
"immersion," hearing directly about people’s experience putting Rust to
work, to get a real sense of how things are feeling. It’s hard to get
that data any other way.
By sharing this data publicly (the full transcripts are available in
addition to the summary), we hope both to inform the broader community
of the challenges for Rust in production today, and also to provide a
kind of “experience report” for people considering adopting Rust in
their own organization.
Finally, I want to emphasize that this is one set of data points
among many that the core team pays attention to. We’ve also been talking
about holding an open “town hall” kind of call, though the logistics
there are much harder to manage. If you have further ideas about how to
gather feedback in a high-bandwidth way, I’d love to hear them!
