Who?

Github: Ticki

Project: Redox OS

Date: 05/06/2018

Why?

Ticki started their blog post talking about how they’ve been working on Open Source projects for a number of years. Eventually, they had gotten really invested in creating projects in Rust.

The first of which was a lack of time. They no longer had time to dedicate anymore because they’re putting everything into pursuing their career aspirations.

My main reason is that I have chosen to pursue a career in mathematics research. This is an extremely tough field and with this decision, I have no way of continuing my involvement in these very time consuming projects. I do not have even a hour to spend a week. And it is simply unrealistic to think that the situation will get any better; I will continue to put all my time and energy into this path.

The second of which was a difference in what direction they wanted the project to move in, versus what the core team wanted to do. Bringing up how they wanted to pursue these really interesting theoretical proposals, was what they wanted to do. However, the core team knew the feasibility of these proposals, and how unrealistic it would be.

Rust is not a research project anymore; it is a real and usable language, and I, more often than not, failed to reflect that in the language proposals.

The people on the core team, who know much more about the long term goals and subtleties in practical design of language features than I do, settled at “this is kind of cool, but maybe we should try something simpler.” And looking back, I fully agree with them. The proposals were not aligned with the language goals. I was, as is recurring, too ambitious, thinking that I could reform the whole type system with all these new nice theoretical properties, many of which are more complicated than useful.

Finally, the fun wasn’t there anymore. After trying to improve something that they had made before, they spent months trying fix a bug which wasn’t enjoyable at all.

In the end, I ran into some obscure bug, that I couldn’t find, and after a month of trying to find the bug, I just gave up. My drive was not there: It was just not fun. My attention span is too short and my drive is too ‘theoretical’ to be a good open source contributor. So I just ended up moving to a new project after spending almost 7 months on this incomplete project.