This justification -- Rome should be written in JS otherwise Rome users are less likely to contribute -- irresponsibly focuses on a secondary goal of the project, at the cost of the primary goal, which is to be a end-to-end toolchain for one of the most popular languages in the world.
Using Rust promises performance and stability, key features for the thousands of engineers that will be running Rome as a critical part of their workflow. The vast majority of those developers would prefer that the tool runs faster and has fewer errors over having a lower barrier to entry for contributing.
"Contributing" may also encompass the plugin/extensibility ecosystem around the tool, and can be closely tied to the underlying implementation language. This functionality has been integral to the growth of things like Babel and Webpack, but it seems in this case Rome is trying to replace much of that very ecosystem.
I there are some toolchains that may prioritize "barrier of entry to contributions" -- new languages, or niche communities for example -- but I don't think it's an appropriate priority for a toolchain for a massively popular established programming language with $4.5 million in funding [1].
Using Rust promises performance and stability, key features for the thousands of engineers that will be running Rome as a critical part of their workflow. The vast majority of those developers would prefer that the tool runs faster and has fewer errors over having a lower barrier to entry for contributing.
"Contributing" may also encompass the plugin/extensibility ecosystem around the tool, and can be closely tied to the underlying implementation language. This functionality has been integral to the growth of things like Babel and Webpack, but it seems in this case Rome is trying to replace much of that very ecosystem.
I there are some toolchains that may prioritize "barrier of entry to contributions" -- new languages, or niche communities for example -- but I don't think it's an appropriate priority for a toolchain for a massively popular established programming language with $4.5 million in funding [1].
[1]: https://rome.tools/blog/announcing-rome-tools-inc/