Comment by kilon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kilon | Hacker News Reader

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Rust is very unpopular. Popular being besides the usual suspects Assembly, Visual Basic, Delphi, Objective C , Swift etc. Finding the popularity of a language is actually pretty easy, ignore all the blog posts and opinion pieces of any kind and focus on third party libraries availability, documentation and benchmarks. Even on benchmarks Rust score very low making its “as fast as C” claim speculative to say the least. Strictness of a Rust also makes it highly unlikely that the language will become popular any time soon. Judging from the fact that innovation of any kind is one big reason for users to stay as far away as possible, even if that innovation ends up being part of all programming languages out there. Explains why innovation has stagnate the last century in software. So my rule of thumb is “if many people talk about it then most likely it’s popular if a ton of people talk about then it’s most likely unpopular”. So it’s definetly an indicator in a bell like curve.

If you mean unpopular in the sense that it’s unlikely it would end up being used for your “average” project I think you’re right. However it’s seeing uptake in key systems programming projects. The most notable is probably Amazon’s Firecracker VMM that underlies AWS Lambda and Fargate. Google is also writing some components of their new Fuschia OS in it.

And Rust is used in various parts of Firefox now. Dropbox uses Rust in their Magic Pocket storage backend. npm uses Rust in its registry service.

Sure, Rust is not going to replace Java anytime soon (probably not at all). But for a language that has seen its first stable release only four years ago [1], Rust is a wildly successful systems programming language.

[1] Before Rust 1.0, Rust was not really usable in production due to very frequent changes to the language.

Rust 1.0 wasn't even that stable or usable in production, albeit it is of course forward-compatible. NLL (introduced with Rust 2018) was a huge improvement in overall usability, and it's likely that we'll see even more such changes in areas such as async. Rust is quite far from true "maturity" in the C/Java/PHP sense.

Comparing a young language like rust to much older popular languages is not a useful comparison.

I'd say given Rust's age it's popular, and since it is the first contender for a lot of spaces where no other languages have made a serious bid in a while (embedded and real-time systems with higher safety guarantees haven't seen much love since ADA).

It will probably not supplant easy super popular languages like python. But I believe it might find it's niche. A lot of other languages don't have such a USP.

> It will probably not supplant easy super popular languages like python. But I believe it might find it's niche.

Yea, I definitely don't think it'll ever be as hugely mainstream as "easy" languages - take Go for instance, but it has huge potential and I'm a big fan of the language (I've switched entirely to it).

It may be possible that another language can come up with a more elegant solution for the memory safety features of Rust, but until that happens I think Rust will gain a lot of ground. It just won't be the language people turn to unless they have a use case explicitly for Rust (or rather, something that disqualifies Go/Python/etc to them).

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