If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust.
With time, perhaps, but why is someone going to do that as a prerequisite for a spare-time FOSS contribution? People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.
No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax.
Knowing the minimal syntax of a language to get past compilation errors is not even remotely close to being “competent” in it. You need to learn the language’s structures, you need to learn how the compiler works, you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using, you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language… The language used can be a HUGE hurdle to overcome.
“You know Python and Javascript, so you can write competent C++ code that is FOSS-contribution-acceptable if you take a week to learn!” (inb4 memory management and pointers and templates and ‘oh no every input field I wrote is a trivial buffer overflow’…)
Because if you know Python, you know
requestsalready. Or flask, or configparser, or itertools, or maybe even pyqt.Languages all have their own ‘most common libraries’, which add to the time it takes to learn how to be competent in that language. If a python dev tells me they know all the syntax, but have no clue what itertools or requests are, my eyebrows go up.
There’s a lot of language-specific knowledge that needs to be learned before you’ll be competent in it, that people don’t even think about.