Hi Jordan, Thanks for bringing this to a broader discussion.
I totally agree that we have a reviewer bottleneck in the iceberg rust community. This trend seems common across many open source projects, especially since AI-assisted coding became the norm, while AI-assisted reviewing doesn’t provide equivalent confidence to project maintainers. Outside reviews are always welcome and are usually very helpful. Personally, I’ve learned a lot from review comments in general, not just from the Iceberg maintainers. Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring code quality falls on the person who clicks the merge button. I’m not sure if we can address the bottleneck immediately, but I’m very curious to hear what other members think about it. We really want to hear and discuss ideas around the project direction through multiple channels, including the email thread, slack, GitHub Discussions, and the rust community syncs. In fact, we just discussed some of the items you mentioned, such as delete manifest processing support, during the iceberg rust community sync earlier today. Besides that, we also discussed adding metadata-level variant support, encryption support, etc., and I believe these all align with the feature parity goals. Looking forward to hearing other thoughts here! Best, Shawn On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 9:29 AM Jordan Epstein <[email protected]> wrote: > Happy Thursday, everyone! > > I wanted to try and kick off a discussion here regarding seeing what we > could do about iceberg-rust and increasing the amount of review bandwidth > there. Obviously, we're constrained to some degree on all of the iceberg > projects but this one is gaining a lot of traction and I've heard > anecdotally of many projects beginning to maintain their own forks here > because getting code reviewed is just too much of a challenge. > > Given that these projects in other languages are generally just trying to > achieve feature parity with Java, it really diminishes them when key > features are missing. > > In iceberg-rust, for example: > - No positional delete writing support > - No deletion vector writing support > - No HDFS support > > One idea that I have to increase reviewer bandwidth here could be to take > some key stakeholders from many of the existing OSS rust-based iceberg > projects and add them here? E.g. somebody (trusted) from DataFusion > (Comet), RisingWave, DataBend, Polars. Perhaps there are also some major > companies in the space that might like representatives (for example I see > Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir in there). Then that person could at > least be the point-person for reviews that are necessary for features in > those upstream codebases. To be clear, I'm mainly suggesting that these > people are given mandates to review changes to get these projects to parity > with the Java versions, and less so focusing on bespoke features specific > to one language. > > I understand that we want all would-be contributors to review as well, but > I can come up with a few examples where a change is reviewed adequately by > somebody that lacks permissions, and then it eventually goes idle since > nobody can supply the approval. > > Let me know what you think! Thank you! > > Best, > Jordan Epstein (IMC Trading) >
