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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

Not too sure what is meant by "mainstream" but I can see Rust getting a foothold in certain industry, such as medical, automotive or aerospace. To get there, it will need to be mature and be stable significant enough. It will also need a big player to take that first step and prove it in production.

Imagine if Ford mandates its suppliers to use Rust for the software in its car and it faced little problems after a few years out on the road.

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I'm big into Rust, but I doubt that anyone in security-critical industries is going to put themselves on the line by using a language that's neither standardized nor government-approved. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and nobody ever got fired for picking MISRA C.

Totally agree with you. Rust is just a baby growing up. C is a middle aged guy with tons of experience. Rust just needs to catch up.

The industry I see Rust making headway into first is actual security. E.g., encrypted communications, etc.

The problem with aerospace, automotive, etc. is that there's substantial physical risk associated with errors. So there's not a lot of incentive to go with something brand new. Things like network security, etc. are a place where people are maybe a bit more concerned about safety than in some other areas, but also need performance, and notions of risk are more vague.

The interest of Tor developers in Rust is not surprising to me at all, for example.

Nothing is going to happen overnight, and I don't see C/C++ going anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Rust gaining a foothold in certain places, and expanding from there. I could also see it being a flash in the pan too, but it's unpredictable really.

I'm an aviation enthusiast and a CS undergrad. I've always wondered what's different about code written for airplanes. Anybody have any insight ? And is there a modern replacement for ADA?

Ada is still under active development and widely used in applications requiring extremely reliable software.

http://www.ada2012.org/

I've used Ada on satellite programs, it's still very popular for that sort of thing. Ada has managed to carve out a small niche for itself in aerospace and I don't think it'll be replaced by rust anytime soon.

Which is fine, nothing wrong with Ada.

> I've always wondered what's different about code written for airplanes. Anybody have any insight?

You might be interested in some publicly available coding standards for the Joint Strike Fighter (C++) and the NASA JPL (C):

http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf

Code for Airplanes (and cars and other safety critical applications) follows a special set of rules in order to eliminate wonkiness that tends to crop up in complied programs (usually the result of undefined behavior, not always the programmers direct fault).

See: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213 (particularly part 3)

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

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