Comment by wrong_variable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrong_variable | Hacker News Reader

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Firstly stop comparing things in vacuum - you need to set expectations accordingly.

Go has google behind it, so regardless of anyone's opinion they can very well jam it down everybody's throat through sheer throwing money at the problem.

Go was build for fast web servers, not for what Rust is aiming for at all.

Rust also has this this obnoxious issue around it that has become a meme :

https://transitiontech.ca/random/RIIR

Rust CAN be a good choice for building a bluetooth driver or writing the logic for pacemaker (oh god no !).

But it has the steepest 90 degree hill to climb mainly because :

- untested in the wild.

- lack of libraries.

- API stability.

You should keep on using Go due to it being better tested, unless some large company throws a few billion dollars behind it, its going to take a lot of time for Rust to catch up on its own.

I bet even by 2025 rust wont get much traction unless some bigCo heavily invests in it, do not take my word for it - just look at purely open source projects like FreeBSD, Linux took nearly 20+ years to get any traction.

> - untested in the wild.

This is a 100% false statement. Here’s a list: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

I’ve been really impressed with how much success people have had with cross platform deployments as well. At RustConf we just saw a talk about one company putting Rust on satellites, doesn’t get more “wild” than that.

> - lack of libraries.

There are some gaps. But new libraries are showing up every day. For middle of the road, non-exotic stuff, I would be surprised if a developer doesn’t have everything they need.

> - API stability.

In the library ecosystem this is a small problem. In the past 3 years I rarely am broken from library upgrades. For the language though, I have never in the same 3 years been broken by a language upgrade. Not to say there haven’t been bugs that the language needed to fix, but stable has never failed to compile my oldest Rust 1.0 code.

Please don’t spread information ignorant of facts.

Putting things on satellites might mean very different things. There is close to zero chance of anything critical being in Rust. One company I worked on has not even move from (a subset of) C90 for critical components. No C99, no C11, no C++03 and no Rust. It is likely that a company may have software in Rust, even running in a satellite module (though unlikely), but that is different than actual satellite systems being certified on Rust.

As for the rest of your argument: in many companies people is still moving to C11 or C++11. For many, software is considered for production only if it has been 5 years in the wild. A library appearing on cargo does not mean it is “available”.

The talk had a diagram, most components on it were in Rust, and the plan is to use more and more moving forward. Even critical stuff.

Happy to hear that, since I am not exactly in joy of using ancient languages.

However, from plans to actual usage takes years; specially for completely new projects using new languages, compilers, libraries, etc. in safety-critical stuff, that takes months just to validate.

Stating anything else is just either lying (marketing) or ignorance. Please do not do a disservice to your language by creating vacuous hype.

That was also a significant part of the talk. Like any industry, some shops are conservative, and some aren’t. Pointing out that some places are more liberal than others isn’t lying.

Here’s the company and product for the sat reference: https://www.kubos.com/kubos/

> For many, software is considered for production only if it has been 5 years in the wild.

Time is irrelevant, it’s about usage and stability. Every rust crate I rely on has published download numbers, which give you an idea of number of people using it. In that set, they are all open source and published on GitHub or Gitlab, so I can look at the codebases easily.

You can wait, that’s fine. But you do end up missing out on helping shape a new environment that is growing at crazy rates over the last few years.

Sorry but that company/product looks like it is a Linux distro and framework tuned/supported for satellite hardware. That does not mean it controls the satellite nor that it is certified.

If you think “download numbers” (or open source, or being in GitHub) is a good metric for measuring reliability, it means you haven’t really worked in any such field.

It isn’t growing _at all_ in many fields, because it is simply way too new (no new software projects started on it), it isn’t certified (or even impossible to certify). That does not mean it is not better, so don’t take that as an attack. It is simply a suicide in risk-analysis to use a new language, new libraries and new compiler front-end in safety-critical projects; so it is a no-go. Similarly for C11, C++14, C++17 and many other languages, frameworks and libraries that you have to approve.

> If you think “download numbers” (or open source, or being in GitHub) is a good metric for measuring reliability, it means you haven’t really worked in any such field.

I never have worked in such a field, and you're comments about certification, etc, are definitely things I will accept as true. Getting any support of new technology in any space is hard, and of course takes time.

But, I will say that "download numbers" where there is obvious sustained usage of a project is a stand-in for understanding if something is seeing real-world usage. I don't claim that it show stability, only that if it's usage is high and the number of issues on the project are not growing under that strain then you can begin to get a picture of it's stability.

When you talk about formal proofs, certification, etc. Those are different mechanisms for validating that, but generally requires substantial amounts of money to be done.

By next year, Google may be the largest single employer of Rust programmers in the world. They might even already be, but the Fuscia team is aggressively hiring.

Facebook is too.

Amazon had a booth, I didn’t get a chance to talk to them about their current deployment personally.

Don’t underestimate China either, PingCap has huge deployments of their database, and while we may not hear about them often in the West, the numbers don’t lie.

This is a story worth developing further and reporting on

there are people right now writing production code in Nim, Crystal, Julia, and Joy (well maybe not Joy except for Jonathan blow himself). someone taking the plunge/risk on a new language is exactly how all three of those issues you allude to get resolved (as a dialogue between language users and language developers). I don't the Google go point? which big company is behind python? ruby? php? are those all also risky languages to build in?

I mean - I agree with a great deal with what you say...but Rust is backed by Mozilla which has written arguably the first or second most popular browser in current use. So, the bigCo argument seems misplaced. Also Google has a history of releasing languages that are often hugely unpopular (cough Dart cough) so I'm not sure that the money argument even holds even if it were true. Cool link though - Rust seems to be very popular among people who know of it, but don't use it.

( I use Firefox )

Mozilla is comparatively not a financial heavy weight like google, Microsoft.

Google has a history of doing a million things that fail, but that is exactly what i mean. They can spam the programming community with millions of things and something will eventually stick. Moz doesn't have that type of financial firepower so for them it's Rust or bust.

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