I like this article already because it took me to the goals of Rust for 2026. We use the language in our team, but we haven't needed to go very deep to do the stuff we need. Yet, I really enjoy witnessing the development of a language from ground up with so much community feedback.

I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.

My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?

> I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.

There seems to be some consensus even within the C++ ISO committee that the evolution process of that language is somewhat broken, mostly due to its size and the way it is organized.

> My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?

Sadly, this seems to be the way things go once a technology catches on, commercially. Can't blame large donors for sponsoring only the parts they are interested in. Fortunately, considerable funding of TweedeGolf comes from (Dutch) government, I think.

In open source I guess there's two types of work: 1. features 2. maintenance

You can 'sell' new features. They cost money to create, but they solve real problems. Those problems also cost money and if that's more than the cost of creating the feature, companies are willing to put in money (generally).

Maintenance is harder. But there are now some maintainer funds! Like the one from RustNL: https://rustnl.org/maintainers/ These are broader ongoing work and backed by many orgs chipping in a little bit.

Idk if it's the best model, but at least it seems to kinda work