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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

As someone writing software in Rust myself I am always interested in knowing about projects using Rust for multiple reasons.

1) In the case of libraries (crates), it might be something I can make use of in the future.

2) I can look at how they solved the problem they are solving and compare that with how I'd do it and maybe learn something new that can be useful to me in my future projects.

3) I want Rust to thrive and I want people to be aware of projects using Rust because the more people that are aware of Rust the bigger is the probability that I can work for more companies in the future writing software for them in Rust.

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Your 2) is by far the most important to me. Not only does it allow to learn about solutions I could repurpose and their used patterns; it can also give me that last missing piece I was looking for that blocked me from building something.

That said, I'm especially looking for software "written in Rust" because I know the build process is standardized. I may need some dependencies, but I know how the build will work (cargo build -> if at all, all build instructions are in build.rs). I compile all rust-based open projects myself, and I have yet to stumble over a non-binding-specific package that won't compile.

Fast rewind/forward n years, and you could replace "Rust" in your post with the name of the language /du jour/.

My original comment was because as an old guy who saw hype around so many languages come and go, I am getting tired of those projects who try to sell themselves only because they are written in Rust.

I've seen many languages with mix and match syntax differences and feature sets that didn't bring anything significant to the table. Rust is not that. It has memory safety while having memory efficiency, high performance, good package management, easy interface with C FFI, and excellent support for parallelism. The list of things it gets "right" from my point of view dwarfs other languages-du-jour.

The biggest downside IMO is you have to get people past some conceptual hurdles before they can be productive with it. (e.g. the borrow checker) Despite how often you see it come up on HN, it doesn't have a powerful marketing force behind it. It also doesn't fit the trend of turning developers into commodities by being as easy as possible.

The excitement around Java existed for two reasons: many people were new to the ideas in Java, and many people were learning it for the first time. Now, every programmer knows about Java's ideas (with the possible exception of interfaces which aren't in Python) and the number of people learning Java is capped at the number of kids being born. If Rust is successful then eventually every programmer who wants to learn it will already know it, and every programmer will know how to use a borrow checker. The nobody will post "made in rust" stuff on HN, but that will be an indication of Rust's victory.

And those projects and posts will also be interesting, for people building their own projects with similar needs in that language du jour.

If you're just an end user, or the project isn't open source, then sure, language might not matter so much.

Rust is probably here to stay seeing as it was picked up by Firefox. I still think it could have been done better, but perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Rust wasn't just "picked up" by Firefox - it was developed by Mozilla for the very purpose of using it in the "next generation" of Firefox technologies.

(The original Rust project as designed by Graydon Hoare was even quite different from the Rust of today, e.g. the C/C++-like focus, with little ot no runtime, is something that only came about around the Rust 1.0 release.)

Note that Rust intentionally lacks some features that would be useful for Firefox development (e.g. developing for the DOM involves object inheritance which isn’t present in Rust), so it’s not like it’s designed to solve exactly their problems and nobody else’s.

Rust has inheritance and polymorphism.

Rust has trait inheritance, but not object inheritance. Servo uses code generation and macros to get around this. (I’m literally writing an operating system in Rust, I know what I’m talking about.)

Could you elaborate on how trait inheritance is different from object inheritance?

"Trait" inheritance is just interface inheritance, which is indistinguishable from composition+delegation. It doesn't have the pitfalls of actual implementation inheritance, which essentially involves an extra "trick" of dispatching on the actual type of your object even when calling base-class methods. It's not that Rust cannot do this - heck, people do it all the time in C. But it has to be done by writing things out explicitly, it's not automatic in any sense. And for good reason - letting base-class code access methods that have been redefined in a derived class can create all sorts of pitfalls when you're not very careful about what that implies.

So was said about Java 20 years ago... Yet no one dares today post a "X in Java" anymore on HN.

And was probably said about Fortran and C. Our tools are getting better. I can only hope Rust becomes so widely used that I can recommend big companies use it since they'll have a trillion developer hiring pool.

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