>I'm the earliest developer still full-time on the Rust language (4+ years) and I was exclusively using Mac OS X from the beginning. If you look at Servo, Mac is actually better supported than Linux at the moment.

You mean XCode and the rest of Apple's developer tools have great Rust support? There are up to date Cocoa bindings?
That would be real Mac support.

I know that many Linux people switched to Mac OS X because it has this whole POSIX system underneath its chrome, which normal Mac users never touch, but which makes an adequate Linux replacement + you get the nice Mac desktop OS on top of that. But as I said I do not see how running ports of Linux tools on that layer qualifies as real Mac support.

>What feedback is that?

Different types of software get developed for Windows, trying to use Rust in these different scenarios might have exposed issues specific to said use cases. Demanding PC games are overwhelmingly developed on and for Windows for starters. And there is also the issue of "cultural incest". There are certain hegemonic attitudes among UNIX developers about how thinks should work, how they should be organized, named etc. Attitudes which are often not shared by other developer communities. However, the early development of C++ happened in a UNIX dominated environment too so maybe this will not be that problematic.

>you talk about a binary installer. That's not something we have on any platform yet.

The thing is, just dropping source tarballs on people is considered acceptable among UNIX developers, that is the way you do things there. But it is not the way you do things on Windows.

>Of course I would, if they were competent developers.

The issue is not technical competence, but "cultural competence" if you will. Building software people on platform X actually want to use, which requires respecting the cultural norms. You just gave a nice example of lacking cultural competence by assuming that not providing a binary installer which does not require manual twiddling is just as acceptable on Windows as on Linux, while it really sends a bad message on Windows and leads to Windows developers never bothering with Rust at all. It is like, nobody on Windows has a problem with closed source drivers .. but the Linux devs hate those.. bad culture fit. It matters, a lot.

>There are tons of popular C++ package managers: Homebrew and apt-get, to name a couple.

apt-get is the Debian package manager, Homebrew is for UNIX devs using the POSIX layer of OS X, neither is a "C++ package manager". These pieces of software are OS specific tools and have no direct relation to the C++ programming language at all.

>That is also precisely what Rust does.

Well, that is great. However, I remain highly skeptical. I can already see the install instruction for Rust libraries on Github etc. "Cargo install foobar", no word about how to build the library without Cargo, the dependencies are only specified in Cargo metadata files etc. Plus as I said package managers encourage developers to write software with lots of dependencies .. which becomes a pain to build without said package manager. While in theory Cargo may be optional, I doubt it will be in practice. The whole Rust ecosystem will grow based on the assumption that everyone uses Cargo, and everyone who does not will be in for a world of pain. Other languages who have official package managers show this.

>Mozilla is not going to invest in a language that won't work on Windows, for obvious reasons.

There is a big difference between being able to turn your particular code base into Windows binaries and actually providing a good development experience on Windows. The first does not necessarily require the second. I think most (all?) Mozilla devs use a UNIX-style development environment, even if Windows is the dominant target platform.

>First-class support for Windows is evident everywhere in the design, from the use of libuv instead of libevent for the green threading to the lack of exposure of `select` or `fork` due to that not performing well on Windows.

Again, I was mostly talking about the developer experience, not about the ability to somehow build fast binaries. That is expected too of course, but not enough for the "first class" label in my book.

>To what? Abandoning the package manager?

Yes. See above for the reasons why. When I build my C++ software on Linux I do not need a special "C++ package manager". I just apt-get the dependencies (e.g. SDL). Does Rust really need something more? As I said, I think a language specific package manager will undermine Rust's ability to be a general C++ replacement.

>and somewhat insulting

I did not mean to insult anyone. I want Rust to succeed, that is my only agenda here. I think you are on the wrong track with this and thus I wanted to warn you about it. Maybe I am completely wrong, we will see. I will not bother you again, because as a Windows game developer Rust is dead to me now.

Maybe I will look at it again once I read about the first major game written in Rust being released, which will probably be somewhere between 5 years from now and never. But right now my money is on never.