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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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melling

“ Rust has been the "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

10 years is a long time. Swift is 5 years old and it seems old and baked.

Considering the buzz Rust has had on HN, etc, I thought it was more popular.

Sounds to me like it needs some sort of push to get over a tipping point.

Often part of the problem isn’t technical. In business people don’t want to be first. Perhaps a few more high-profile users.

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Rust 1.0 was released in 2015, and before that you'd have breaking changes every month that effectively made it unusable for anything but toy projects. So it's not even 5 years old really.

Besides a big target for Rust is the C and C++ world. On Hacker News in my experience you have a majority of commenters coming from the web world where no news in one year effectively means that the project is dead.

For us in the low level world "stable for 4 years" means "maybe we can start considering using it in production" and the lack of big buzz every other month is more a pro than a con. I'll take boring and reliable over shiny and breaks-every-other-year.

I've just started adding a new feature on a C project started in 2009. If I used Rust I'd want to know that my dev environment will still be usable in 2019. I think the commitment to stability will pay off eventually.

Agreed, Rust's "popularity" in production projects is a topic to be revisited circa 2025-2030.

My personal intuition is that it will have become a strong alternative to C++ by then, and Go will probably eat the other side of that (at the 'upwards' frontier of C++, before/underneath e.g. Python), which given a decade could result in maybe 25-30% of major C++ projects moving or with plans to Rust/Go. That would be a healthy balance of alternatives, a true victory for these mid/low-level contenders.

It's not like the bottom of the stack can be won the likes of Python or Js at 80-90% within a decade. Structurally, it simply cannot.

Though I would argue they are different demographics somewhat. Mobile app and mac developers I would argue keep up with the times much more aggressively compared to c/c++ developers I know.

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